SAN JOSE — A man who spent the past 10 months in an Arizona prison is now in a South Bay jail in connection with a fatal shooting in San Jose last year, after investigators linked him to the killing as he served his time in the Southwest, according to authorities and records.
It turns out that 33-year-old Noel Cortez was extradited from San Jose to Arizona in September after a run-in with San Jose police officers revealed he was the subject of an arrest warrant in that state. But at the time, police didn’t know about his alleged role in the July shooting that killed one man and wounded another near the Santa Clara County Fairgrounds.
Cortez is currently being held at the Santa Clara County Main Jail without bail, according to jail records. He was booked June 29 in the San Jose jail after being extradited again, this time with SJPD homicide detectives escorting him, from a prison complex in southeast Arizona the previous day.
The shooting behind Cortez’s newest arrest was reported in the early morning hours of July 31, 2022 in the 300 block of Umbarger Road, where responding police officers found two men suffering from gunshot wounds. One of the victims was able to get to a hospital himself and survived, but another wounded man, 25-year-old Sacramento resident Bryan Alberto Lopez Fajardo, died at the scene.
It was after Cortez was sent back to Arizona that San Jose homicide investigators pieced together his alleged involvement in the double shooting; police did not detail how they determined Cortez’s involvement in a Monday news release announcing Cortez’s arrest.
But court records indicate that suspicion was made official April 6, when the shooting charges against him were filed in the county Superior Court. In the meantime, police said detectives arranged with authorities in Arizona to extradite Cortez as the end of his prison term approached.
Online prison records from Arizona are not clear on what fueled the arrest warrant behind his most recent incarceration, and the state’s Department of Corrections did not provide requested information Monday. But the public records posted by the state show that he was convicted of attempted aggravated assault in August 2015, and was given a seven-year prison sentence that he began serving in May 2016.
The records show that he served at least three years in prison custody, and was on parole for some portion of his sentence, including when he was in San Jose last summer when the deadly shooting occurred. His prison term from the 2015 conviction officially ended last week.
Anyone with information about the July 31, 2022 fatal shooting in San Jose can contact the SJPD homicide unit at 408-277-5283 or email Lt. Mike White at 4104@sanjoseca.gov or Detective Sgt. Ted Reckas at 3440@sanjoseca.gov. Tips can also be left with Silicon Valley Crime Stoppers at 408-947-7867 or at svcrimestoppers.org.
Source: www.mercurynews.com