Jonisha Mendoza, a 31-year-old Hispanic / Latino female from Reseda in Los Angeles, California, was killed on Sunday, December 13, 2020, inside an apartment in the 18400 block of Kittridge Street near Reseda Boulevard. Police said West Valley officers were called to the location around 8:25 a.m. and found Mendoza unresponsive with a gunshot wound. She was pronounced dead at the scene.
The apartment where Mendoza was found was not her home, which immediately left investigators with
questions about why she was there, who else had been present, and what happened before officers arrived. Public reports described the case as a homicide investigation, and police asked for help identifying and locating whoever was responsible. Early coverage stated that the killer remained at large the day after her death.
Mendoza’s family later described the pain of losing her just before Christmas. Her mother, Patricia Hernandez, said Mendoza was a mother of three and emphasized that she did not live in the apartment where she was killed. According to later reporting, Hernandez said it took investigators eight days to locate the person who lived in the apartment, and she expressed concern that the delay may have affected the investigation.
Public reporting later indicated that a suspect had been detained, but the suspect’s name was not publicly released because the case was still pending. Hernandez said the suspect was released from jail after about three months because of a lack of evidence while detectives continued working the case. The reporting also described the suspect as female, though no publicly available source identified her by name at that stage.
A close family member later shared a bittersweet update in Mendoza’s homicide case, saying that while justice was served in court, it also failed her because the price placed on her life resulted in only a short sentence. The family member said they were left dumbfounded by some of the evidence presented and questioned why the district attorney convinced Mendoza’s mother that accepting a deal was the better option. They said they wanted to fight for an all-or-nothing outcome, especially based on the same evidence that had been used in court to argue for higher bail.
To the family member, the resolution did not feel like true justice. They believed the case was settled through what felt like the easiest and surest way to close it, rather than a full fight for accountability. In their words, giving a murderer a deal is not justice, but settling for less.
