Fatal Beating in Oxnard Baffles Man’s Relatives

Two-year-old Eduardo Sanchez plays with the roses and candles that mark where his father was beaten. He is too young to understand why they sit there, amid shattered bottles beneath a broken street light.

In fact, no one who knew Raymundo Sanchez understands why the 22-year-old strawberry picker was attacked Saturday night, sustaining injuries so severe that family members removed him from life support Tuesday.

It was on the very day he was attacked that Sanchez had returned to south Oxnard from Mexico, where he had been deported about a year before. That morning, Sanchez and his 17-year-old wife and son posed for a family portrait in his in-laws’ Cypress Road home.

Relatives and friends say Sanchez did not know the young men who approached him and a few of his friends Saturday as they drank beer and listened to music. Maybe they mistook Sanchez for someone else, his brother-in-law said, or maybe the group of eight or nine was just looking for someone to hit with their bats and clubs.

“We don’t know how it happened,” Sanchez’s mother-in-law, Juana Lopez, said. “Everybody was already in bed. All we heard where we were was people running. I told my husband, ‘Go see what happened.’ When I came out all I saw was him there on the ground.”

Sanchez was bloodied and leaning against a telephone pole, just yards across a dirt alley from his in-laws’ modest home. His friend Jose Gonzales, 19, had sustained a minor head wound in the attack. Gonzales was treated at an Oxnard hospital.

But Sanchez was taken to Ventura County Medical Center, where he was kept alive by a machine before dying Tuesday afternoon. Relatives, friends and community leaders held a vigil Wednesday night for Sanchez, remembering his sense of humor and the way he cared for his family.

Oxnard police say that Sanchez’s brothers-in-law witnessed the assault but have not identified his attackers.

Brother-in-law Benito Lopez, a freshman at Channel Islands High School, said he had gone into the house before Sanchez was beaten and before he could make out any of his assailants’ faces. The street light atop the telephone pole where Sanchez was left has a shattered bulb.

“If it would have worked, I would have seen their faces,” Benito said.

All he heard, Benito said, was the young men yelling “Southside,” suggesting to him that they were part of a south Oxnard or Port Hueneme gang. They had arrived on foot and on bicycles, he said. Sanchez was not connected to any area gangs, police said.

When he lived in Oxnard, Sanchez picked strawberries for a local grower. On Thursday, his widow, Ismelda, picked up a Social Security check at her husband’s former employer.

“He liked to share everything,” she said. “He was a good man and had a lot of friends. He loved his family.”

Times photographer Carlos Chavez contributed to this story.