REDWOOD CITY — Only one person has been sentenced to death in San Mateo County in the past 30 years — a case that San Mateo County District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe himself helped prosecute.
The decision by Wagstaffe on Tuesday to seek the death penalty against Chunli Zhao — the farmworker accused of killing seven people in a workplace rampage two years ago — appears to fit in line with the longtime district attorney’s willingness to seek capital punishment for some of San Mateo County’s most high-profile cases.
Wagstaffe prosecuted five death penalty cases prior to winning office and has recently defended capital punishment in court filings. That included his work prosecuting Alberto Alvarez for the 2006 fatal shooting of Richard May, an East Palo Alto police officer who died in a shootout while responding to a fight at a taqueria.
Alvarez, who was shot in the thigh during the encounter, was sentenced to death in 2009 for the killing. The case marked the last time a district attorney sought to execute anyone in San Mateo County.
Along with the Alvarez verdict, Wagstaffe won a death penalty conviction against Jon Dunkle, who killed two Belmont boys in the 1980s. Dunkle also was sentenced to life in prison for killing a 12-year-old Sacramento boy 1985.
Wagstaffe also helped prosecute Anthony John “Jack” Sully, who was sentenced to death in 1986 for six killings across the Bay Area. Juries deadlocked in the death penalty cases of two other men – Marvin Sullivan and Ronald Price – that Wagstaffed prosecuted.
Much of Wagstaffe’s work came amid an unusual run of death penalty cases in San Mateo County. From 1983 through 1994, prosecutors in the Peninsula sought the death penalty 18 times, winning verdicts in 14 of those cases.
More recently, in 2021, Wagstaffe joined the district attorneys of San Bernardino and Riverside counties in asking California’s First District Court of Appeal to let lethal injections resume despite Newsom’s March 2019 moratorium against executions. The trio’s argument that their counties had separate interests than the state drew pushback from the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California. A court later sided against the three prosecutors.
Despite that body of work, Wagstaffe had never sought the death penalty as district attorney prior to Tuesday’s announcement in the Half Moon Bay mass shooting case.
Wagstaffe declined to comment on his decision Tuesday, citing a gag order on the case. One of Wagstaffe’s top lieutenants handling the Zhao case, Assistant District Attorney Joshua Stauffer, also declined to comment on the decision after Tuesday’s hearing, similarly noting the gag order.
Jakob Rodgers is a senior breaking news reporter. Call, text or send him an encrypted message via Signal at 510-390-2351, or email him at jrodgers@bayareanewsgroup.com.