Oakland dad identified as mass stabbing victim after slashers random rampage

The victim of a a deadly mass stabbing in Oakland this week was identified and remembered as a man who kindly helped out family, friends and even fed the homeless.

Oakland dad Gonsalo Lopez, 58, was killed in the crazed rampage.

Jose Jesus Rodriguez, 34, is accused of the 30-minute horror show across Cesar Chavez Park and three other locations that killed Lopez and left four others injured on Monday.

Family members this week mourned Lopez, who lived with his wife and three sons not far from the park.

Lopez was a longtime chef, his son Kenny Romero, 28, told Mercury News, who would regularly take meals to the park to feed the homeless. That fateful night, Lopez did not have food with him but went to visit people.

He “just helped people. He was a really good person. He would go to the park as often as he could and they would always say ‘thank you,’” said Romero.

Lopez had only just returned home from vacation to Honduras, where he is from, to visit an adopted daughter.

Romero added that Lopez was a great father who sacrificed for his family.

“He was a super great father,” Romero said. “He worked really hard to give us every opportunity. Whenever we needed something he would help us.”

The perpetrator Rodriguez himself was a mentally disturbed homeless man on parole for a previous knifing spree.

In 2019, he also stabbed an Uber driver and garbage collector. He was sent to prison for the attack and released on parole in 2023.

After his release, Rodriguez was hit with multiple parole violations and failed to find work, KTVU reported. He allegedly tried to bite off a police officer’s ear and swung a wooden board at two people.

A parole agent wrote last year that “there are no programs to appropriately address Rodriguez’s escalating behavior, adding he “poses a significant threat to the community.”

The four other people stabbed on Monday were a 47-year-old man, a 31-year-old man, a 52-year-old woman and a 20-year-old man.

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