Suspect in Beating of Ex-San Francisco Official Don Carmignani Will Stand Trial Regardless of Self-Protection Claims

A San Francisco businessman who briefly served on the Hearth Fee matches the outline of the suspect in a number of pepper-spray assaults on homeless folks close to his home, a police investigator testified Thursday.

Don Carmignani bears a “sturdy resemblance” to the person who was caught on video spraying a sleeping homeless individual within the face one night time in November 2021, Sgt. Nicolas Pena stated in courtroom.

His testimony helped a public defender make a self-defense argument for why her consumer Garret Doty, who’s homeless, mustn’t stand trial for beating Carmignani with a steel pole in April. 

However San Francisco Superior Courtroom Choose Linda Colfax dominated that prosecutors had introduced sufficient proof for Doty’s case to go to trial, discovering {that a} jury ought to resolve the self-defense difficulty.

The ruling got here after days of testimony in a case that grabbed nationwide headlines and fed dueling narratives about unchecked crime in San Francisco and a development of vigilantism in cities across the nation.

Carmignani, 53, was attacked on April 5 after confronting Doty exterior the properties the place the previous metropolis official and his dad and mom stay subsequent door to one another within the Marina District, in response to video and witness testimony.

He suffered critical accidents together with a fractured cranium, damaged jaw and a wound to his cheek that left flesh hanging down the aspect of his face.

In an interview with KPIX after the assault, he stated there have been “animals on the street” threatening his household and that police couldn’t cease it.

“My metropolis is in chaos,” Carmignani stated.

However the case took a flip when Doty’s public defender, Kleigh Hathaway, revealed that police famous that at the least eight different pepper-spray assaults on homeless folks have been “presumably associated” to the beating.

Hathaway used these studies to argue that Doty beat Carmignani in self-defense as a result of her consumer knew the previous official had a historical past of violently pepper-spraying homeless folks within the space.

Throughout Thursday’s proceedings, she stated the concept Carmignani was a sufferer was “laughable.”

“Carmignani is a violent, menacing vigilante, the type of one who would proceed to threaten a person who is way smaller,” Hathaway stated.

By his attorneys, Carmignani denied being the perpetrator in these different spray assaults. On the stand throughout an earlier courtroom date, he refused to reply questions on most of them and stated solely that he was leaving city on the day of one of many incidents.

Colfax allowed the case to proceed regardless of discovering that Carmignani instigated the assault, having confronted Doty with a big canister of what was described in courtroom as “bear mace” or pepper spray.

“Mr. Carmignani’s actions on this circumstance on this present day have been something however the actions of the weak as he was the preliminary aggressor,” she stated.

She additionally discovered that Carmignani was an unreliable witness whose testimony was contradicted by video footage and who selectively stated he couldn’t recall particulars about what occurred.

“I don’t discover Mr. Carmignani’s testimony to be credible,” Colfax stated.

Her ruling got here after Pena, the lead investigator within the case, testified throughout questioning by Hathaway that he didn’t do any follow-up investigation on the opposite bear-spray assaults regardless of Carmignani becoming the suspect description in a number of of them.

Pena stated he didn’t do additional investigation as a result of in two of the incidents, the age of the suspect didn’t match Carmignani. Additionally, he had video footage that captured the beating.

However Colfax criticized police for not digging into these leads.

“I’m troubled—and that’s a considerably beneficiant phrase—that there was no follow-up, regardless that Sgt. Pena discovered that these different incidents” concerned related suspect descriptions and homeless victims, Colfax stated.

Whereas Doty was in custody Thursday after getting arrested for skipping an earlier courtroom date and violating a stay-away order, Colfax ordered his launch forward of his subsequent courtroom date July 25.

She positioned him on digital monitoring and ordered him to get therapy for anger administration and substance abuse points.