California jury finds father guilty of murder in his infant children’s deaths
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- A Yolo County jury convicted Paul Allen Perez of multiple infant murders.
- Investigators used DNA to solve the 13-year cold case and arrest Perez.
- Perez faces life in prison without parole and is scheduled to be sentenced April 6.
A Yolo County jury on Tuesday found Paul Allen Perez guilty of murder for the deaths of his infant children killed years apart, one after the other, more than two decades ago.
Perez, a 63-year-old transient man, was convicted of the child murders from 1992 through 2001 throughout Central and Northern California, the Yolo County District Attorney’s Office announced in a news release.
“These crimes involved pure evil,” District Attorney Jeff Reisig said in the news release. “The defendant should die in prison. May the souls of his murdered children rest in peace.”
Perez, who remains in custody at the Yolo County Jail, is scheduled to be sentenced April 6 in Yolo Superior Court. Prosecutors said he faces a maximum sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The victims were Kato Allen Perez, born in 1992, who was previously known to be deceased; Nikko Lee Perez, who was born in 1996; Mika Alena Perez, who was born in 1995; a second Nikko Lee Perez, who was born in 1997; and Kato Krow Perez, born in 2001.
None of Perez’s children lived to see 6 months. The remains of the three children born since 1995 have yet to be found.
The District Attorney’s Office prosecuted Perez on five counts of murder, one for each of the infant sons and daughters prosecutors say he killed.
On Tuesday afternoon, the jury found Perez guilty of one count of first-degree murder and three counts of second-degree murder, court records show.
The jury found Perez not guilty of first-degree and second-degree of murder in the fifth homicide charge. Court records show the jurors could not reach a verdict on a count of involuntary manslaughter for that fifth homicide charge, so Judge Daniel Wolk declared it a mistrial.
Prosecutors said the jury found Perez guilty of one count of assault on a child younger than 8 years old with force likely to produce great bodily injury resulting in death. His conviction included an enhancement for multiple murders.
The investigation into the child murders began in March 2007, when a fisherman pulled a steel container out of a Yolo County slough. Inside the container were the badly decomposed remains of an infant. The investigation turned into a cold case for 13 years with no new information.
“There were many doubts the case would ever be solved,” Reisig said at a January 2020 news conference announcing Perez’s arrest.
In 2018, Reisig’s office formed its own DNA cold case division. This was on the heels of the high-profile DNA-aided arrests of the now-convicted Golden State Killer/East Area Rapist Joseph DeAngelo and NorCal Rapist Roy Charles Waller in Sacramento County.
Yolo County investigators, working with state Department of Justice forensics experts, loaded DNA information into a special indexing system checking weekly for direct matches. They then looked for matches based on kinship drawing investigators ever closer to a break in the case after developing a list of potential siblings or parents of victims.
In October 2019, investigators had a name: Nikko Lee Perez, a boy, born in Fresno in 1996, the third of Perez’s five children. Then, investigators learned Nikko was not an only child and that four of his siblings had died as infants.
Perez, then a 57-year-old Delano man, was serving a sentence at Kern Valley State Prison for assault with intent to commit rape. He was days away from his release from prison when he was arrested in connection with the infant killings.
This story was originally published January 6, 2026 at 5:15 PM.
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