California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) commuted the life sentence of a convicted mass shooter and former gang member to eight years in prison, and the state of Golden State now employs the convicted shooter within the California State Capitol.
An effort to downplay the story of violent offender Jarad Nava, a seeming vanity piece in the Los Angeles Times attempted to justify his crimes of the shooter by referencing his troubled upbringing and cited Newsom to support the claim that he has undergone genuine reforms and is now a good citizen, as Breitbart News reported.
In 2014, following his involvement in a gunfight related to a gang, Nava was found guilty of four counts of attempted murder, prior to his appointment as an assistant in a state senate committee.
As a teen, Nava, a member of the Pomona Don't Care Krew street gang, was involved in an escalation of violent assaults from minor offenses.
“Nava said he doesn’t remember much of what happened when the white truck he was riding in swerved into the opposite lane and pulled alongside a Lexus sedan carrying what he thought were his enemies,” Times staff writer Hannah Wiley wrote.
Nava fired multiple shots into the vehicle carrying 16-year-old Yesenia Castro, her 15-year-old sister Marlene Castro, Jessila Suarez, 25, and Marlyn Reyes, who was 17 and nine months pregnant.
The two younger women were allegedly dating other gang members, and the sisters' brother belonged to the rival gang. Nava was reportedly “high and drunk,” so he “doesn’t remember telling the four, according to court records, they were ‘gonna die today,'” the Times noted.
Although no one was killed, Yesenia's spinal cord was severed by one of the bullets, leaving her paralyzed and requiring a wheelchair to this day.
Nava was just 17 years old, according to Wiley, and he had a troubled background. The story described Nava's family life in depth, saying that he was "born to a struggling 19-year-old mom and absent dad" and that he had "no stability."
“In order to protect myself, I felt like the more I perpetrated violence on others, the safer I would be,” the offender told the publication, recalling how he was initiated into the gang at 16.
Nava, who was furious at the time of his arrest and indignant he was being punished, refused to accept a plea bargain of a 30-year prison term and instead chose to stand trial as an adult.
He was sentenced to 162 years in prison; 40 years to life on each attempted murder charge, plus two years for firearm possession. However, when a progressive criminal justice reform movement battled for his release, Newsom commuted Nava's sentence to 10 years to life in March 2020.
“Nava walked free from California State Prison Solano more than 150 years early on Dec. 22, 2020,” the Times reported.
In a documentary about the case, Yesenia, his paralyzed victim, claimed that he still ought to have received a lengthy sentence: "This act of clemency for Mr. Nava does not minimize or forgive his conduct or the harm it caused,” Newsom wrote at the time. “It does recognize the work he has done since to transform himself.”
Nava now works for the Senate Public Safety Committee on “modify[ing] the criminal justice system in California to focus on rehabilitation in lieu of lengthy prison terms.”
After leaving the women he shot with severe physical and psychological scars, Newsom described how he cried over Nava allegedly changing his life.
“I came back and started crying in the office. To read a report about somebody, to see a ridiculous overcharging, to consider his age in relationship to that crime, to take a risk on a commutation … and then to see him all dressed up, so proud that he has a job. And I remember that meeting because he kept talking about how he felt a sense of responsibility not to screw up. Not for himself, but for others.”
