Jurors find homeless San Francisco man not guilty of pipe smashing

A homeless man who beat a former San Francisco city official with a metal pipe was found not guilty of assault charges Friday, capping a case that had drawn national attention as a symbol of the city’s crime and homelessness problems until a public defender made a surprising discovery. story back.

The defendant, Garret Allen Doty, 25, faced as many as seven years in prison if convicted of the charges stemming from an altercation in San Francisco’s wealthy Marina neighborhood. On the evening of April 5, police responded to a local resident, Don Carmignani, 54, who had a skull fracture and serious facial injuries that required more than 100 stitches. Multiple witnesses identified Mr. Doty as the attacker, and police arrested him minutes later.

But the public defender in the case, Kleigh Hathaway, determined that Mr. Carmignani had spray-painted a can with what appeared to be bear mace before Mr. Doty attacked him. Ms. Hathaway uncovered eight unsolved cases in which pepper spray or bear mace had been used against homeless people in the area. She said it was enough to argue that Mr. Doty had responded in self-defense.

The judges finally agreed on Friday.

“This case shows us that the citizens of San Francisco can still tell the difference between right and wrong,” Ms. Hathaway said in an interview afterward.

The San Francisco District Attorney’s Office said it respected the jury’s decision and declined to comment further.

In April, Mr. Doty had recently moved to San Francisco from Louisiana and was living in a tent on the sidewalk near an apartment owned by Mr. Carmignani’s parents. After the attack, he was arrested and charged with three felonies: assault with a deadly weapon, assault with force likely to cause serious bodily harm, and battery causing serious bodily harm.

Mr. Carmignani was a cannabis entrepreneur who had briefly served on the San Francisco Fire Commission, an unpaid panel. He also owns a number of properties in the city, including a building in the financial district that houses a pharmacy and an Italian sandwich restaurant.

Neither Mr. Doty’s lawyer nor the district attorney’s office disputed what happened between the two men that April evening: Bystanders with cellphones had captured videos showing Mr. Doty hitting Mr. Carmignani with what appeared to be a pipe, while Mr Carmignani had his hands raised in what appeared to be a defensive manner.

But there was less clarity about the motive for the attack — and especially about what happened just before witnesses started recording video. on their phones. After being released from hospital, Mr Carmignani told a local television station that the abuse reflected wider trends in the city.

“You have animals on the street saying they are going to rape your daughter and kill your mother,” he said at the time. Several media outlets, including Fox News and local television stations, called the story an example of “lawlessness” in San Francisco and California in general.

But the picture was soon clouded by witness statements. A Marina resident, Kristin Onorato, told police she saw Mr. Carmignani tell Mr. Doty he would “kill” him if he did not move his tent from the sidewalk. When Mr. Doty refused, she said, Mr. Carmignani sprayed him with a can of bear mace — a faster-emitting version of pepper spray with a higher capsaicin content.

The case turned out to revolve around that van. While searching a crime database, police found eight previous reports, dating back to 2021, in which a suspect had sprayed a homeless man at the marina with a chemical.

“I believe the suspect is targeting the unhoused population for unknown reasons,” an officer had written at the time.

Descriptions of the suspect varied, but several of them broadly matched Mr. Carmignani’s physical appearance: a white male who weighed between 250 and 300 pounds and stood approximately six feet tall.

Although no one had been charged in the spraying attacks, Ms. Hathaway used them to try a risky strategy: trying to link Mr. Carmignani to the earlier incidents to show that her client, rather than being the aggressor, acted to defend themselves. against a man believed to be a neighborhood watch.

During the trial, Mr. Carmignani’s former mother-in-law testified that the person seen in a blurry cellphone video of an earlier bear club attack “looks like Don,” according to The San Francisco Chronicle. His ex-wife, Yvette Corkrean, now a Republican candidate for the California Senatetestified that Mr. Carmignani hit her.

Kourtney Bell, an assistant district attorney, tried to convince the jury that Mr. Carmignani’s history was not on trial in the case. Ms. Bell acknowledged that Mr. Carmignani was the initial aggressor, but said Mr. Doty’s attack was an excessive form of revenge against him.

San Francisco police have opened an investigation into Mr. Carmignani in connection with the previous attacks.

San Francisco’s homelessness problem has received particular attention since the pandemic began. The homeless population hasn’t changed much since 2017 — hovering around 7,800, of whom about 4,400 are unsheltered. But a number of factors have contributed to a rise in fear, including overdoses and street crime incidents that regularly go viral.

The still-unsolved marina attacks point to a less salient reality, which is that violent attacks on homeless people have also become part of life in California cities. In 2021 a homeless man died of burns in San Francisco after his sleeping bag was set on fire. In November, three homeless men were shot dead while sleeping on the streets of Los Angeles.

In April, weeks after the marina incident, a homeless man named Banko Brown was shot in the chest and killed while trying to steal candy from a Walgreens in San Francisco. In that case, the prosecutor, Brooke Jenkins, declined to charge the guard with murder, ruling that he had acted in self-defense.