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Family and supporters of both men shot and killed 2-1/2 years apart by the same sheriff’s deputy in Danville, who was recently sentenced to prison for the first death, gathered Friday near the location of the second shooting to mark its one-year anniversary and call for a permanent memorial to both victims.
Led by local organizers and the father of Tyrell Wilson, approximately 30 demonstrators gathered at Sycamore Valley Road and Camino Ramon starting at 4:30 p.m. on March 11, one year after Wilson was shot by now-former Contra Costa County sheriff’s deputy Andrew Hall. Wilson, 33, died at the hospital days later.
“I felt like my brother killed my son, at first,” Tyrell’s father Marvin Wilson, a retired Orange County sheriff’s deputy of more than 30 years, said on the first anniversary of his son’s shooting.
Hall, a deputy assigned to the Danville Police Department under the town’s contract with the county, was back on patrol on March 11, 2021 after having been previously cleared by Sheriff David Livingston of wrongdoing in the shooting death of Laudemer Arboleda in Danville in 2018.
But District Attorney Diana Becton would go on to charge Hall in connection with Arboleda’s death just over a month after the deputy shot Tyrell Wilson. A jury convicted Hall of felony assault with a firearm and he was recently sentenced to six years in prison.
Families of both Arboleda and Tyrell Wilson reached settlements with the county in their separate lawsuits of their loved ones’ death, with Arboleda’s family agreeing to $4.9 million last October and Wilson’s family receiving $4.5 million last week.
However, families, activists and a number of local community members are continuing to push for increased awareness and solutions surrounding mental health issues, which both Tyrell Wilson and Arboleda suffered from, that don’t depend on police responses that many believe can escalate and turn unnecessarily deadly.
The families of both men and their attorney are also calling for additional charges to be brought against Hall by DA Becton in connection with Tyrell Wilson’s death. Prosecutors’ investigation remains ongoing.
Marvin Wilson said that he watched footage of his son being shot one year ago that day repeatedly, trying to make sense of what happened, but that he couldn’t understand Hall’s actions in response to what he said was clearly a mental health episode from his son.
“He saw Hall as a threat, not as a police officer,” Marvin Wilson said. “That’s what they fail to understand. You could tell by his voice.”
Marvin Wilson said that while he didn’t believe Hall’s actions were reflective of other officers in Danville, or their training, Hall had hurt the reputation of police officers everywhere, particularly locally.
“I wore a badge also,” Marvin Wilson said. “You tarnished the badge. You tarnished good officers, good deputies, reputation, and in the (town) of Danville. Do I think Danville has good officers? Yes I do. But he tarnished that. He put a stain on that.”
Marvin Wilson said that his son had been a star athlete as a teenager, who was eyed by Division I sports programs for his baseball prowess, and on the path to his choice of a number of scholarships from prestigious colleges. Despite the certainty of a sports scholarship, the teenage Tyrell Wilson was pushed to get good grades by his dad, proudly showing off a 3.5 GPA one night as he asked for permission to go on a nighttime snowboarding trip with his close friend.
The trip would end fatally for Tyrell Wilson’s companion, and resulted in a traumatic brain injury for him. Marvin Wilson recalled between the death of his friend, and the slow burn of personality changes and mental issues that can result from brain injuries, Tyrell Wilson stopped being a carefree teenager, and started to change. In particular, his father said that Tyrell never got over the death of his friend, who was memorialized on a recent tattoo Marvin Wilson found on his son’s chest upon coming to visit him at John Muir Medical Center in critical condition after last year’s shooting.
“A settlement is not going to silence me and it’s not going to make me disappear … I’m here for justice for my son.”
Marvin Wilson, father of Tyrell Wilson
Marvin Wilson said that his son’s homelessness at the time of his death was the result of choice, not lack of funds, with the family being relatively well-off.
“He was staying with his uncle in Pittsburg, and he just left, and you just have to let him go through his cycle until he calms down and then he’ll come back. But he never was a violent person,” Marvin Wilson said of his son.
Sheriff Livingston and his office have argued otherwise, saying Hall was responding on March 11, 2021 to a report someone matching Tyrell Wilson’s description was throwing rocks from the Interstate 680 overpass onto the freeway.
When Hall contacts Tyrell Wilson, the man first backs away and then pulls out a folding knife, according to video of the encounter released by the sheriff’s office. Tyrell Wilson keeps the knife in his hand, but doesn’t point it toward the deputy, as he takes two swaying steps forward and appears to say “kill me”. In that second, Hall fires a lone shot at Tyrell Wilson’s head and the man collapses to the ground.
John Burris, a prominent civil rights attorney representing both the Wilson and Arboleda families, said that Hall’s recent sentencing in Arboleda’s death, and the county’s settlement with Wilson’s parents, were small prices to pay, particularly for the deaths of two vulnerable people with mental health issues.
“To me the punishment did not fit the crimes he committed,” Burris said, of Hall’s six-year sentence.
Burris, who has built his career as a civil rights lawyer through a number of high-profile cases involving police brutality, said that cases like Hall’s, in which the same officer shoots and kills two people in separate incidents, have been uncommon in recent years.
“We don’t have many … cases in recent memory, where an officer was involved in more than one shooting,” Burris said.
Although no stranger to grizzly and often tragic circumstances in the cases he works on, Burris said that he was shocked to hear about news of Wilson’s death in 2021.
“It was shocking, disappointing, an outrage, that this man killed a second time and he hadn’t been punished properly the first time. So it was like a dagger ripping my own heart,” Burris said.
Having already been involved in the litigation against Hall from Arboleda’s family, Burris said that he was all the more frustrated, arguing that Tyrell Wilson’s death could have been prevented if Hall hadn’t still been on the streets of Danville.
“If they had punished the man properly, assigned him, reassigned him, fired him, then Mr. Wilson would not be dead,” Burris said.
Of the settlement, Burris said that rather than being a victory, it was an acknowledgment of what had happened in Tyrell Wilson’s death, and that it shouldn’t have.
Marvin Wilson said that the settlement was no replacement for his only son, but that he was glad to have the case out of the way so that he could be more vocal about calls for additional charges against Hall by the DA’s Office.
“A settlement is not going to silence me and it’s not going to make me disappear,” Marvin Wilson said. “I’m here for justice for my son.”
