Assistant District Attorney Hans Moore volleyed a rapid-fire line of questions at Dacari Spiers, the victim of a police beating: Did the officers announce who they were? Why were they there? Did they identify themselves as police officers?
“No, no, no,” Spiers testified today in the trial of San Francisco Police Department Officer Terrance Stangel, who has been charged with four felony counts in the 2019 beating of Spiers. It was the first time Spiers took the stand, and the questioning and cross-examination Wednesday went on for some five hours. It is expected to resume on Thursday.
“I was being grabbed,” Spiers said decisively. “So I tried to figure out who was grabbing me … I remember thinking they were gonna kill me.”
In Spiers’ first day of testimony, the questions broke down, in detail, the night three years ago when Officer Stangel beat him multiple times with a baton and left him with broken bones in his wrist and leg.
The trial is thought to be the first criminal trial against an on-duty San Francisco police officer regarding an on-the-job beating. And, in line with how the trial has played out to this point, the prosecution and defense painted vastly different pictures of what transpired on the night Spiers was beaten, an event that was captured on the officers’ body-worn cameras.
On Oct. 6, 2019, San Francisco police officers responded to a domestic violence 911 call from a woman alleging a man was choking and dragging a woman near Fisherman’s Wharf. After police officers Stangel and Cuauhtémoc Martínez located Spiers and his girlfriend, Breonna Richard, as the subjects of the call, they quickly approached Spiers.
Within 10 seconds, Stangel drew his baton and beat Spiers’ legs and wrist eight times, as shown on his body-worn camera footage.
On Tuesday, Spiers’ on-and-off girlfriend of more than a decade, Breonna Richard, vehemently denied domestic abuse allegations.
Spiers today recalled that day as one of wine-tasting with his cousin Kyle and then-girlfriend Richard at Pier 39. Kyle invited them to a music video shoot in a parking garage near the wharf, he said.
At one point, Richard realized her wallet was gone. Spiers said he decided to console Richard as he’d learned to do for 12 years — by making her laugh. He said he wrapped his arms around her from behind, cuddling her as they walked away from Kyle’s car, to buoy her spirits.
“I was hugging her. I don’t know what to call it. A waddle?” Spiers said.
“I’m taller than Breonna … ” DA Moore said, rising and asking Spiers to demonstrate their positions.
“Uh … ” Spiers said, awkwardly wrapping his arms around Moore and shuffling while remaining embraced. They attempted to waddle in a semi-circle in front of the jury.
“It’s okay,” Moore assured him, as the courtroom erupted into laughter. “It’s not the first time.”
Spiers said that they were by Kyle’s car, where Richard was checking for her wallet, when a group of girls walked by. They acted like he “smelled like doo doo” and had their noses up in the air, he testified. He called out “something slick” to them in an attempt to cheer up Richard: “Ain’t nobody hold you like that?” he said that he asked the girls.
The voice on the 911 call reporting the domestic violation was that of a young woman.
During the cross-examination, Stangle’s counsel, Nicole Pifari, suggested a different scenario. Richard, she said, perhaps blamed Spiers for the missing wallet, since Kyle was his kin. Then, she suggested, the two started fighting.
When Pifari asked Spiers if he was fighting with Richard over a missing phone, Spiers appeared confused as to why the attorney was talking about a cell phone. Did Spiers curse at his girlfriend, pick her up by the head, drag her, and tell her “I got you now, bitch. You ain’t going no motherfuckin’ where.”
Spiers denied all of this. During testimony Tuesday, Richard also denied any instance of domestic violence.
Spiers said on the stand today that after his brief “waddle” with Richard, the couple returned to the car. Richard sat on top of it, with Spiers standing between her legs. He had his back turned to the officers when they approached, but he said today that he could see his girlfriend’s face change after she saw something behind him.
“I kissed her on the forehead, but she was clearly somewhere else,” he said. Suddenly, Spiers said, he felt contact on his left shoulder.
Spiers denied threatening the officers verbally or physically, but said he moved his feet to get away from the officers.
“It had been so fast, it was a blink of the eye,” Spiers recalled today in court. “I couldn’t [tell] who it was. I was already being hit with a baton. I felt it in my legs and sides.”
Spiers said he dropped to the ground, thinking that might make the blows end. He raised his hands to his face to protect his head from a potential baton strike, he said. That resulted in a broken left wrist after Stangel struck him.
If Spiers’ hand wasn’t there, would the baton have hit Spiers’ head? Moore asked.
“Yes,” Spiers confirmed.
In the cross-examination, Pifari presented statements that contradicted Spiers’s testimony.
First, the defense again asked Spiers to confirm that he received no prior warning before the police approached, as he testified earlier. Then, she read into the record the original statements Spiers gave to the paramedics, the hospital where he was admitted, as well as those he gave to investigators the following day.
In the video where Spiers speaks to the paramedics, which is caught on an officer body camera, he states he saw “someone who looked Asian” get out of the car. “He immediately arrested me,” Spiers said. He also told the investigators on Oct. 7 that officers told him to “get on the ground” three times. Pifari said his earlier testimony contradicted that statement.
Then the defense rolled footage from Martinez’s body camera, where Martinez says, “Come here,” “hey, relax,” and “face the wall.”
The video shows Spiers saying, “I ain’t facing no wall.” Pifari slowed the frames and suggested that Spiers put a hand on an officer’s chest to resist arrest. Spiers said “he saw” an officer hassling him, and the movement was an attempt to move away.
“If you said, ‘I ain’t facing no wall,’ you probably heard him say ‘face the wall? right?” Pifari asked.
Spiers denied this. When Pifari asked why he would mention the wall without prompting, Spiers said it was because he was being approached and “doing nothing wrong.” He then asked San Francisco Superior Court Judge Teresa M. Caffese for a break, and sat outside with his head bowed.
The paramedics’ notes also said that Spiers reported to them that he never lost consciousness.
Spiers consistently rebuffed the defense’s questions, saying he could not recall what happened that night because he had blocked it out and because he was beaten, had passed out, and later was on medication.
“If I did say that in the film, it was because I was discombobulated, and in pain,” Spiers said.
The questioning then moved to cover a subsequent night when Spiers was still in the hospital. The defense said Spiers yelled and cursed at a nurse, and had a screaming match with his girlfriend, Richard.
Again Spiers testified that the scenario the defense imagined was inaccurate. The couple never fought each other, Spiers said. Instead, they were shouting at the police officers who showed up at his hospital room. The officers served Spiers with a restraining order against Richards, an event recorded on their body-worn cameras.
During cross-examination, Spiers said the officers never read him a restraining order, and that one officer threatened him, demanding that he not testify or press charges.
The defense played the body camera footage from that night in the hospital: Oct. 10, 2019. In the video, Spiers grows agitated and raises his voice, alleging that the officers are out to get him.
“You gon’ lie to my face? You gon beat my ass? … You’d like to finish it?” Spiers asks the officers at one point.
It is unclear who filed the restraining order but, in the video, Richard can be seen repeatedly telling officers that she did not want to leave Spiers and go with them. She attempted to assist her boyfriend by calling his lawyer and demanding the badge numbers and names of the police officers present.
“This is harassment. Y’all just beat the shit out of my boyfriend and you think I’m leaving with you? You crazy,” Richard said on the video shown today.
At one point, she collapses onto Spiers’s lap, teary-eyed. “It’s alright, it’s alright,” Spiers said to her, his good leg shaking.
“Did you hear the officers threaten you in that video?” Pifari asked on Wednesday.
“Not in words,” Spiers said.
So, did he “lie” earlier that day, Pifari said?
“It’s not a lie,” Spiers said. He can be threatened non-verbally. “It’s how you see the body language, the way they look at you.”
During cross-examination, Pifari also asked why he filed a $700,000 lawsuit against the officers involved, attempting to frame Spiers’ intentions as money-motivated.
Instead, Spiers denied filing one. It wasn’t until Pifari brought him a copy later in the trial that he acknowledged it. “You asked for a settlement?” Pifari said. “It was denied the last time I checked.” (Following a delay, the Board of Supervisors approved the payout on Monday.)
As the prosecution expected, Pifari brought up each of Spiers’ former arrests and convictions, which spanned from 2012 to 2018. Both times he was arrested for domestic violence, but he was not charged in either case. He has at least one felony conviction, for punching three separate men.
The trial continues at 9 a.m. Thursday with Spiers on the stand for another round of questioning.
I have a hard time believing that a group of girls walked by and turned their nose up at him for just existing. Did those girls also call 911 and lie about him committing domestic violence for no reason? Why would they do that? You don’t just walk by some random dude on the street and go you know what I don’t like how he looks, I’m going to call 911 and tell them he’s committing dv. The logic in his testimony just isn’t there.
You might if you were a Mill Valley girl who had too much to drink. Anyway, despite what she/they saw or thought they saw, by the time the cops get there, no one is hitting, punching, strangling anyone, just two people sitting next to each other minding their own business. A 911 call is not a license to beat someone to a pulp or kill someone like Alejandro Nieto on Bernal Hill.
Really? You honestly think that no white girl has ever walked by a black man, felt uncomfortable or didn’t like the way he talked to her, and called the police with a made up story? Do you not remember any of the recent stories about black people having the police called on them for jogging in a white neighborhood, BBQing, dancing to music on headphones, birdwatching in a park, selling bottled water (that one was in SF!), using a coupon at CVS, eating lunch in a college cafeteria, napping in in a dorm common area, babysitting white children, swimming at a public pool, sitting at a Starbucks, mowing the lawn…? The list goes on and on. Or if you can’t remember any of those story’s from the past few years have you not read anything about the long history of lynching in this country? What an ignorant thing to say!
Sophie has accurately described the DIMINISHED sfpd! They should not be allowed to walk amongst CIVIL people of sf. Chesa Boudin is ABSOLUTELY the best DA to help solve these too many years of very bad policing in sf. Cops need to be much better
EDUCATED! They hunted and destroyed youth way too long, sfpd has been criminally inclined since b4 Los Siete of 60s and 70s. Sfpd group mentality is diminishing police DAILY
I am fully aware that white people call the cops on black people all the time for stupid things. But a black woman calling 911 for domestic violence is completely different than all of the other reasons you mentioned above. Yeah, she could have made it all up, but there were two 911 callers and both of them went into a lot of detail. Also the 911 caller stated she feared that Spiers was going to kill his partner. What’s ignorant is the people sweeping the domestic violence in this case to the side and saying that the cops didn’t see any domestic violence and both Spiers and his ex denied it so it must not have happened. And that mindset is deadly. And it’s exactly what happened in the Laundrie and Petito case.
Why would the 911 caller, who was black, go into very specific detail, that someone was being choked, dragged by her hair, and that isn’t even the only evidence of domestic violence.
Sorry, E. How many of the girls in that group were white? There have been way too many incidents in the last few years of white women calling the cops on Black people for moving into their own home, selling cookies, or even telling them to leash their dogs in a “no unleashed dogs” area. The openly turning up their noses at Spiers’ existing doesn’t say “comfort with Black men” to me.
Frankly, it sounds like the 911 call was primo Karen behavior.
None. None of those girls were white. The woman who called 911 was black.
Funny. Neither Mission Local account mentions the race of the group of girls who walked by Spiers. Nor is the race of the person making the 911 call mentioned.
Where’s your evidence?
Perhaps a Black reader could correct me here. But the description of the girls’ behavior sounds more like something I usually associate with white women.