REDWOOD CITY — San Mateo County District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe will seek the death penalty against the man accused of gunning down seven Half Moon Bay mushroom farm workers in the county’s deadliest mass shooting on record.
The decision, announced at a court hearing Tuesday, ends months of debate within Wagstaffe’s office over whether 68-year-old Chunli Zhao should face the possibility of death at his still-to-be-scheduled murder trial.
Death penalty cases are increasingly rare in the Bay Area, especially after Gov. Gavin Newsom implemented a moratorium on executions in 2019 and moved to dismantle San Quentin prison’s death row. In San Mateo, it marks the first time in more than 15 years that prosecutors will ask a jury to consider death.
The move follows an unusual — and lengthy — death penalty review by Wagstaffe’s office that began in April and centered on Zhao for the January 2023 workplace shootings, which spanned two Half Moon Bay mushroom farms and pulled back the curtain on decrepit working and living conditions for migrant farmworkers across the Peninsula.
Wagstaffe has declined to offer details about that review, citing a gag order in the case. Assistant District Attorney Joshua Stauffer, the prosecutor handling the case, and one of Zhao’s attorneys, Jonathan McDougall, would not comment on the decision after Tuesdy’s hearing.
Zhao has pleaded not guilty in the Jan. 23, 2023 mass shooting, which left seven people dead and another severely injured. Authorities say he first killed four workers and severely wounded a fifth at California Terra Garden — where he lived and worked for seven years — before continuing his shooting spree at Concord Farms, another mushroom farm across town.
The violence all allegedly stemmed from a workplace grudge triggered by a $100 equipment bill from his boss for damage to heavy construction equipment, authorities said. Moments before allegedly opening fire, Zhao vented his frustrations at a supervisor and a co-worker whom Zhao blamed for a collision between his forklift and a bulldozer, prosecutors claim.
After the confrontation, he allegedly shot the supervisor and the co-worker, along with the co-worker’s wife and two others at the first farm. Prosecutors say Zhao then gunned down a former assistant manager and another couple at the second farm. Zhao surrendered to authorities hours after the shootings. He remained held Tuesday in the San Mateo County jail without bail.
The rampage illuminated deep concerns about living conditions among migrant workers living on farms across San Mateo County, where state and county officials described the workers’ dwellings as “deplorable.” As the county’s deadliest mass shooting, the rampage also raised questions about whether Wagstaffe would seek to execute the man believed responsible for it.
Wagstaffe himself has never sought the death penalty since becoming San Mateo County’s district attorney in 2011. Still, he prosecuted five death penalty cases prior to winning office and has garnered a reputation for being open to capital punishment. In 2009, Alberto Alvarez was placed on death row for the fatal shooting of Richard May, East Palo Alto police officer who responded to a fight in 2006 at a taqueria.
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 — which centered on the notion 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.
Wagstaffe’s decision comes as public sentiment continues to sour on capital punishment, even as executions across the nation have increased slightly in recent years.
Americans have increasingly sided against the practice of capital punishment, with only 53% of respondents in a 2024 Gallop poll saying they favored the death penalty. That was the lowest level of support since the early 1970s, and a significant decline from the 80% support the issue garnered when it was most popular in 1995.
Even so, the nation’s political winds may be shifting.
President Donald Trump issued an executive order the day of his inauguration titled “Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting Public Safety,” marking swift change from his predecessor. Just weeks before leaving office, former President Joe Biden commuted the sentences of all but three of the 40 people on federal death row just weeks before leaving office.
Death sentences across the nation ticked upward in recent years after falling precipitously since their peak in the 1990s. At least 26 people were sentenced to die in 2024, an increase of at least five people from the previous year, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. It marked the 10th consecutive year of less than 50 such sentences across the nation – a broad reversal from the 1990s, when more than 250 were routinely sentenced to death each year.
Nearly 20 years have passed since anyone was executed in California, which holds more condemned prisoners than any other state in the nation.
In 2019, Gov. Newsom ordered a moratorium on executions across the state, calling it a “failure” and arguing that the death penalty was “inconsistent with our bedrock values and strikes at the very heart of what it means to be a Californian.” Three years later, he began moving to dismantle the state’s death row by moving condemned inmates out of San Quentin State Prison to other institutions across the state.
Meanwhile, several district attorneys have publicly argued against the practice. Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen announced plans last year to resentence all 14 people on death row for crimes in his county, nodding to Newsom’s work to dismantle death row and saying that “it is time we recognize this reality and dismantle these sentences as well.”
All but one of those Santa Clara County death row inmates saw their execution orders wiped from the books. The lone exception was Richard Wade Farley, who gunned down seven people in 1988 during a workplace massacre at the Sunnyvale offices of ESL Inc.
Newsom’s maneuvers, however, always came with the caveat that his successor could easily scrap those mandates and resume executions after his final term in office ends next year.
In some quarters of the state, prosecutors have continued asking juries for the death sentence. Among them is Solano District Attorney Krishna A. Abrams, who plans to ask a jury to condemn a 34-year-old Sacramento man to death in the January 2021 killing of a woman and a teen girl in Vacaville.
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.
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