On the night of August 21, 2025, 19-year-old Samantha Rose Camacho was found shot near Anderson Park along the 6300 block of North El Dorado Street in Stockton. Officers were dispatched at 10:22 p.m.; she was rushed to a hospital, where she died. A makeshift memorial rose in the parking lot at the park—balloons and clusters of candles around a hand-lettered poster that read “Long live Sammie” and “We love you,” a public expression of grief that marked her death as the city’s 24th
homicide of the year at that time.
In the immediate aftermath, detectives released little about what led to the gunfire, and no suspect information was made public. Coverage centered on the location—just north of East Swain Road—and the late hour, with neighbors and passersby absorbing the shock as investigators worked the scene. Online tributes captured her name and age and fixed the date and city, placing 19-year-old Samantha Rose Camacho in a growing ledger of victims of gun violence in Stockton.
Weeks later, a break in the case arrived from an unexpected direction. On September 24, 2025, Stockton police announced that a 23-year-old man, Walter Burgess, who had already been arrested in a separate August 30 shooting, had been linked by detectives to the August 21 killing in which 19-year-old Samantha Rose Camacho died. Authorities said Burgess, then in custody, would face additional homicide charges stemming from the August 21 shooting near Anderson Park; investigators did not disclose a motive.
As autumn neared, the story of 19-year-old Samantha Rose Camacho remained threaded through candlelight vigils and brief police updates: a late-summer evening, a burst of gunfire by the park, and a name repeated in news articles and memorial pages while the case moved into the courts. The portrait that survives online is spare but insistent—her age, her city, the date—and a community’s insistence that the loss of a teenager not slip quietly into statistics.
