Victor Sanchez was twenty-nine years old in the fall of 2009. He was married, the father of two young children, and worked long hours at two separate restaurants to provide for his family. One of those jobs was at an IHOP restaurant in Riverside, California.
To the people who knew him, Victor’s life revolved largely around work and his children. His children were reported at the time to be only three and seven years old.
There was nothing in the public descriptions of Victor’s final day to suggest that he believed he was in danger.
Friday, October 30th, 2009 was payday. According to Jerry Martinez, Victor’s manager at IHOP, Victor received his paycheck shortly before leaving work at approximately three o’clock that afternoon.
From work, Victor apparently went to cash the check. That mundane decision placed him in front of a surveillance camera, and provided detectives with their most important evidence.
Shortly after leaving work, Victor arrived at a market near Magnolia Avenue and Jurupa Avenue in Riverside. Surveillance cameras were recording. The footage captured Sanchez Victor his paycheck. But the cameras also recorded another man whose behavior subsequently drew the attention of investigators.
According to the Riverside Police Department’s current cold-case summary, the unidentified man appeared to be watching Victor closely. He was also observed pacing around the market parking lot. At some point, the stranger approached Victor. The two men briefly spoke in Spanish.
Nothing publicly released indicates that the exchange appeared openly hostile. There was apparently no visible fight or confrontation in the parking lot that would have warned bystanders of what was about to happen.
Then the unidentified man entered the passenger side of Victor’s white pickup truck. Victor drove away. What happened inside the truck during the next several minutes remains unknown.
The distance between the market and the place where Victor Sanchez’s truck ultimately stopped was small, approximately half a mile apart.
According to Riverside police’s present reconstruction of the crime, about five minutes after the stranger got into the pickup, witnesses saw Victor’s truck traveling in the area of the 5900 block of Brockton Avenue near Jurupa Avenue.
At around three forty p.m., it suddenly jumped the curb. The truck then crashed into a building.
Inside was Victor Sanchez. He had been stabbed multiple times.
Victor was unresponsive when he was discovered. Emergency personnel transported him to a hospital, where he died from his injuries.
A normal Friday afternoon had turned into a homicide investigation in a matter of minutes. And somewhere between the market and Brockton Avenue, the man who had climbed into Victor’s passenger seat had disappeared.
Investigators immediately focused on the unidentified man captured by the market’s security system. On November 4th, 2009—five days after the killing—ABC7 aired images from the surveillance recording and reported that Riverside police regarded the unknown man seen interacting with Victor Sanchez as their murder suspect.
The circumstances make robbery one conceivable explanation for what happened. But Riverside police’s public cold-case account does not establish a motive, nor does it state that Victor Sanchez’s paycheck money was definitely stolen.
There are therefore important questions that cannot be answered from the public record. Did the stranger know Victor before that afternoon? Was their brief conversation an introduction between strangers, or did they already recognize each other? Did the man ask Victor for a ride? Was Victor specifically targeted after cashing the check?
Without identifying the man captured on surveillance video, detectives have been unable to publicly answer those questions.
The crime also came amid another period of grief for the Sanchez family. ABC7 reported in 2009 that Victor’s brother had previously been shot to death in a dispute involving a wristwatch. The report did not suggest that the two killings were connected.
Years passed. The murder became a cold case. There may be evidence known only to investigators: physical evidence from inside the vehicle, fingerprints, biological material, the location and pattern of blood, or witness statements that have never been released.
As of September 2026, the Riverside Police Department continues to list Victor Sanchez among the cases being pursued by its Homicide Cold Case Unit.
Crime Immemorial 