SAN FRANCISCO (BCN) — Two suspects arrested in connection with the fatal stabbing of a construction worker in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood Friday morning have also been charged in connection with a second attack that occurred last month, prosecutors confirmed today.
Lizette Maria Cauich, 23, and Oscar Mendez, 43, are set to be arraigned this afternoon in San Francisco Superior Court on multiple felony charges.
Cauich and Mendez, both Los Angeles residents, were arrested Friday in connection with the fatal stabbing of Mitzi Campbell, 58, according to police.
Campbell, a San Francisco resident, was working at a construction site on Shipley Street, an alley between Harrison and Folsom streets, on Friday morning when she had an argument with a man and a woman there, police said.
She escorted the pair away from the site, but when she didn’t come back right away, her co-workers went looking for her around 9:30 a.m. and found her stabbed, police said.
The co-workers saw the man and woman, later identified as Mendez and Cauich, walking away and tried to stop them. They followed them to the area of Fifth and Folsom Streets, where officers
arrived and arrested them.
Campbell was taken to a hospital but died there shortly afterward.
Since their arrest, Cauich and Mendez have been linked to a previous stabbing that occurred in the Tenderloin around 1:30 p.m. on May 29.
Police said that stabbing occurred in the area of Eddy and Taylor streets after the suspects, described as a 23-year-old woman and a man of unspecified age, asked the male victim to use a portable toilet located on a lot there.
When the victim refused, the suspects allegedly stabbed him in the upper torso with a knife, causing life-threatening injuries.
According to a statement issued by Mayor Ed Lee on Friday, Campbell was a 2013 graduate of San Francisco’s CityBuild construction job training program and a member of Laborers Local 261.
Cauich faces charges including murder, attempted murder, mayhem, assault with force likely to commit great bodily injury and battery with serious bodily injury, according to jail records.
Mendez is charged with attempted murder, mayhem, assault with force likely to cause great bodily injury, battery with serious injury, carrying a dirk and dagger, possession of a controlled substance, receiving or buying stolen property and giving false information to a police officer, as well as two previous felony warrants.
Both are currently being held without bail.