“Ten shots. The deputy fired 10 shots into the slow-moving vehicle of a mentally ill man,” she said. “You will find his response was excessive, unnecessary and unreasonable, and you will find him guilty as charged.”
However, Pifari countered that Hall ran into the gap between his and his sergeant’s patrol cars, thinking that Arboleda had given up the chase, but was then taken by surprise when the suspect’s car headed directly toward him. She said video shows the car steered away from Hall after he started firing.
“This was an extremely close call,” Pifari said. “Andrew Hall fired at the driver to get him to stop or slow down or maybe change course a little bit, and it worked.”
Former Sgt. Chris Martin, who was at the scene of the shooting, testified Monday that he feared being hit by Hall’s gunfire.
Martin said he and five deputies were working in Danville that day — Nov. 3, 2018 — as contract officers for the city, when they responded to a late-morning call about a suspicious person.
“These are fairly common calls,” Martin said, adding that they usually turn out to be false alarms — a salesperson, perhaps, or someone looking for a friend’s house.
At the judge’s request, Martin wore a plastic face shield while on the witness stand, allowing him to remove his mask so the jury could see his face as he testified.
In the dashcam video of the incident, two of the officers spot Arboleda’s car and try to pull him over. His car stops several times during the 7-minute pursuit, but pulls away right when the officers step out of their patrol cars.
In court, Martin recalled being concerned about the radio traffic he listened to that day, and left the station to join the pursuit.
“Something just raised the hairs on the back of my head,” he said. “Something might go wrong with this call.”
Assistant District Attorney Christopher Walpole asked Martin about a brief discussion officers had over the radio in which they considered terminating the pursuit — and whether the severity of any suspected crime would have factored into that decision. Martin testified that a car chase might be “not worth it,” and said he grew increasingly concerned as Arboleda headed toward downtown Danville.
“If you just robbed a bank, we’re probably going to chase you more vigorously than if you stole a soda from 7-Eleven,” Martin said from the witness stand.
He added that Arboleda was not initially suspected of any crime.
Arboleda’s family members have said he had been struggling with mental illness, but declined to go into further detail. In late 2019, the Sheriff’s Department also reported that Newark Police had “committed Arboleda for psychiatric evaluation” months before his death, and that he had several contacts with law enforcement after that.
Recordings and radio dialogue from the deadly incident show Hall driving past Martin and turning from Diablo Road onto Front Street, partially blocking Arboleda’s path. Martin then pulls up nearly parallel to Hall’s vehicle, leaving a narrow gap between the two patrol cars, with space on either side of the wide road to drive around them.
Arboleda stops, then slowly accelerates into the gap as Hall gets out of his patrol car and starts to run around it.
Martin said he wasn’t looking at Hall, but he knew roughly where his deputy was when he heard the first shot fired.
“I kind of closed my eyes and braced,” he said. “I thought that I may get shot.”
Martin is scheduled to continue testifying Tuesday, and is likely to be followed by other officers who were also at the scene of the shooting.
A separate federal civil lawsuit against Hall filed by Arboleda’s mother is also proceeding toward trial. Investigations into Hall’s killing of Wilson are ongoing.
