DeAndre Grinner, a 38-year-old Black man, was killed on July 10, 2024, inside a home on 16th Street in Clearlake, California, in a shooting that authorities treated as a domestic homicide from the start. Investigators said the fatal shot came from a shotgun, fired once, and that the woman inside the home, Dominique Irene Molina-Dominguez, was the one who called to report what happened. When officers questioned her, reports said she admitted she was the shooter, turning a chaotic emergency response into an immediate criminal case built around her own words and the scene she had summoned police to.
Molina-Dominguez was arrested that same day and booked on a murder charge, with prosecutors soon alleging the killing was not spontaneous but planned. Early reporting described investigators’ belief that she had been lying in wait for Grinner at the residence, an accusation that shaped the case narrative into something darker than an argument gone wrong: the idea of a trap set in a familiar place, waiting for a man to walk through the door and into the final moment of his life.
As the case moved through court, the charging decision hardened into first-degree murder with additional allegations tied to the use of a firearm and aggravating circumstances, while Molina-Dominguez entered a not-guilty plea and denied the allegations. At a later preliminary hearing, prosecutors outlined pieces of what they believed drove the confrontation: testimony that Grinner was texting or speaking with another woman on the morning of the shooting, that Molina-Dominguez discovered it, and that an argument escalated until the gun went off. At the same time, reporting said Molina-Dominguez claimed she was a victim of domestic violence and told officers Grinner had struck her with a broom just before the shooting—an account that placed the coming trial on a knife-edge between prosecution claims of premeditation and a defense narrative of fear and retaliation.
A judge ultimately ordered her to stand trial, and she remained in custody as the case advanced. By early February 2026, after a three-week trial, a jury returned a guilty verdict for first-degree murder, convicting Molina-Dominguez in the shotgun killing. The reports describing the verdict emphasized the same core elements that had framed the case since the beginning: the 16th Street home, the single shotgun blast, her call for help, and the state’s insistence that the shooting was an ambush rather than a split-second act.
