The verdict capped a case that began with a missed ride home, a burned car and a chase across the Central Valley.

MADERA, Calif. — A Madera County jury has convicted Vicente Alexandro Jasso in the 2023 killing of 19-year-old Melanie Stephanie Rios Camacho, a former girlfriend who disappeared after leaving her AutoZone job and was later found dead in an orchard west of Highway 99.

The verdict put a courtroom end point on a case that has hung over Madera County for more than two years. Jurors found Jasso guilty of murder and found true special-circumstance allegations of kidnapping and robbery, leaving him facing life in prison without parole. The case drew attention because of the speed of the investigation, the discovery of Camacho’s burned car within hours of her mother’s missing-person report, and Jasso’s arrest after a high-speed chase in which investigators said he threw out some of her belongings.

Prosecutors traced the case back to the night of Nov. 24, 2023, when Camacho finished work at an AutoZone on Gateway Drive in Madera at about 10:15 p.m. Surveillance video later showed her 2014 white Nissan Altima leaving the area shortly before 10:30 p.m. About 11 p.m., she sent her mother a text saying she planned to meet a friend after work. By the next morning, when she had not come home, her mother reported her missing at about 6:45 a.m. Detectives soon learned from the friend mentioned in the text that no meeting took place. Instead, investigators said, Camacho planned to meet an ex-boyfriend. Authorities later identified that ex-boyfriend as Jasso, a Madera resident Camacho had dated for a few months before the breakup in the days before Thanksgiving.

The investigation moved quickly after the missing-person report. Within about two hours, authorities received a call about a car burning in the area, and investigators determined it was Camacho’s Altima. Witnesses reported seeing a blue Ford Mustang with a black hood near the scene. Detectives used surveillance footage to connect that car to Jose Lopez-Hernandez, a friend of Jasso’s. After deputies questioned Lopez-Hernandez and served a search warrant at his home, investigators said information from that search led them to an orchard near Avenue 20 west of Highway 99, where human remains believed to be Camacho’s were found. Authorities have said publicly that Camacho’s cause of death has not been released. That left one major question unresolved even as the larger outline of the crime came into focus: not whether Camacho had been killed, but exactly how prosecutors said the killing was carried out.

By early Monday morning, investigators had shifted their attention squarely to Jasso. Deputies spotted him in Madera driving a minivan registered to him and tried to stop him at about 6:30 or 7 a.m., according to law enforcement accounts published after the arrest. Authorities said he refused to pull over and led officers on a chase that ran north through the Central Valley, reaching speeds reported at more than 100 mph before turning back south. During the pursuit, investigators said, Jasso threw some of Camacho’s belongings from the vehicle, including her driver’s license. A spike strip eventually disabled the van. Jasso then ran on foot into a residential area before officers, aided by a helicopter, captured him. The image of a suspect tossing a dead woman’s identification onto the roadside became one of the case’s defining facts, not because it proved every element on its own, but because prosecutors used it to argue consciousness of guilt.

The broader case also included Lopez-Hernandez, though on a much narrower track. He was charged as an accessory after the fact rather than as the killer. Court reporting from the case shows he later pleaded guilty to that felony and was sentenced in February 2025 to three years in prison. He has since been released. Jasso’s record also became part of the public picture around the case. Local reporting cited a criminal history dating to 2016 that included prior arrests involving domestic violence, witness intimidation, evading officers and reckless driving. Those prior cases did not decide the murder trial by themselves, but they added context to the prosecution’s portrayal of a former boyfriend who, according to trial coverage, could not accept the breakup.

Camacho’s death struck especially hard in Madera and nearby Firebaugh, where family and friends publicly mourned a young woman whose routine Friday night turned into a criminal case spanning years. The locations tied to the investigation still read like a tight map of the final hours: the AutoZone parking lot on Gateway Drive, the road where her Nissan was seen leaving town, the site where her burned car was found, the rural orchard off Avenue 20, and the freeway corridor where the chase ended. At each step, investigators added one more piece to the sequence. In court, the prosecution’s task was to turn that sequence into a narrative jurors could trust beyond a reasonable doubt. The defense position was not fully detailed in public reports after the verdict, but the guilty findings on murder, kidnapping and robbery show jurors accepted the state’s reconstruction of what happened after Camacho left work.

Jasso was scheduled to be sentenced on April 16, when the case was set to move from conviction to punishment and the court was expected to formally impose a life term.

Author note: Last updated April 15, 2026.