If the people can’t do it, might as well let the defense
try.
So said Santa Clara County Deputy District Attorney Mark Hood
Tuesday afternoon after he agreed, on behalf of the people, to let
the attorney for Pete Joseph Valdez III
– the man accused of trying to shoot a Gilroy police officer in
the face – try to recover any potential video footage from Gilroy
police.
If the people can’t do it, might as well let the defense try.
So said Santa Clara County Deputy District Attorney Mark Hood Tuesday afternoon after he agreed, on behalf of the people, to let the attorney for Pete Joseph Valdez III – the man accused of trying to shoot a Gilroy police officer in the face – try to recover any potential video footage from Gilroy police.
Valdez briefly appeared at the Santa Clara County Superior Courthouse in San Martin today and will return 9 a.m. Oct. 31 along with his private attorney, Berndt Ingo Brauer, and any video evidence their side may have discovered from cameras in police cruisers that may or may not have been rolling that morning in November. Valdez could plead not guilty at his Halloween hearing and then the case would head into preliminary hearing, “but anything could happen,” Hood said.
Four cars responded to the Nov. 15 incident, when officer John Ballard noticed Valdez, 29, bicycling about 3 a.m. without a headlight. When Ballard tried to stop him, Valdez took off. Ballard caught up with Valdez a few blocks later, and a foot chase ensued, police said. Valdez ultimately pointed a .25-caliber semiautomatic handgun loaded with seven hollow-point bullets at point blank range at Ballard’s face before pulling the trigger repeatedly, police said.
The gun misfired, but Ballard’s car did not have a camera inside to capture the event anyway, according to Sgt. Jim Gillio. Two of the cars that followed did have cameras, but they were not working correctly or were not being used at all, according to the city’s IT Director, David Chulick. The fourth responding car did not have a camera. The police department is in the process of replacing the old, faulty equipment.
All this means video evidence probably does not exist, according to Gillio and Hood, the deputy district attorney. Even if one of the two cameras were rolling, police have said the incident likely took place out of frame or either before or after the other cars arrived.
But Brauer is not willing to risk anything, and Hood understands that, especially, he said, after Gilroy’s IT team was unable to recover any potential video.
“I don’t think there’s anything to be found, but the defense just wants to make sure that there’s not anything to be found,” Hood said outside his office Tuesday. He added that Brauer and his team were trying to coordinate a time to come to the police station to fiddle with the video archives and see if they can find anything.
The difficulty in finding any footage began after the city’s IT department moved physical video databases from the old police department to the new one sometime between Nov. 12 and Dec. 7, 2007. An employee removed some of the heavy disk drives from their shelving units to make their transportation easier, but that person did so without noting their specific order, which is vital because reinserting the drives out of order corrupts the data. The city has spent about $7,000 to identify the correct order, and since late July, Chulick has been looking for any Valdez footage.
“But we were told to hold off on it for now,” Chulick said Tuesday. He explained that one of the drives was still not cooperating and that he had planned to send it off for further repair but was told to pause work and keep all the equipment on site, lest the drives get lost or further damaged during another trip.
The IT team’s entire search stems partly from Superior Court Judge Hector E. Ramon’s order last May for GPD to preserve all electronic information. Among a laundry list of requests before the preliminary hearing takes place, Brauer has also included the operation and maintenance histories of the department’s cameras, permission to inspect the relevant vehicles and the hard drive that stored any potential videos along with the upkeep log for the storage device.
Valdez faces felony charges of attempted murder of a police officer, assault of a police officer with a firearm, being a felon in possession of a gun, and delaying or resisting a police officer. If convicted of these charges Valdez, who has been denied bail, would spend the rest of his life in prison.
In an interview with police after the incident, Valdez said he pulled the gun in hopes that an officer would shoot and kill him.
“I don’t want to live,” said a crying Valdez after he was apprehended, according to court records.
Valdez – the son of former 16-year Gilroy councilman Pete Valdez Jr. – has 10 prior convictions including three felony convictions for a strong-arm robbery.
