Holly MatkinSan Francisco, CA – San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin’s office said it has dropped charges against one of several suspects caught on camera attempting to carjack a 75-year-old woman outside a Safeway store in March.
Multiple sources said the charges were dropped despite overwhelming proof of the suspect’s guilt, KABC reported.
During the attack, which occurred in broad daylight, multiple female suspects could be seen grabbing the elderly woman by her hair and dragging her across the pavement.
“This is cut and dry. I watched them beat this old woman and drop her across the concrete,” an unnamed witness who intervened in the attack told KABC.
According to the good Samaritan, the 75-year-old woman was walking to her Lexus parked outside a Richmond District Safeway store when a trio of women suddenly attacked her.
The women grabbed the victim by the hair and dragged her across the pavement, the witness told KABC.
Police said the suspects stole the woman’s keys and purse and attempted to carjack her.
“These girls are punching her, kicking her, stomping on her,” the witness recounted.
That’s when he knew he had to intervene.
“I just punched through the back window,” he told KABC. “It was loud enough and kind of scary enough to freak them out.”
Video footage showed the women as they got out of the vehicle and scurried off to a nearby car to make their getaway.
The Good Samaritan said he called police and did what he could to comfort the victim.
Another witness described the elderly woman as being “tough as nails,” and said she declined medical treatment, KABC reported.
Police later arrested at least one of the suspects – a 16-year-old girl – and charged her with aggravated assault, elder abuse, robbery, and conspiracy.
Despite witness accounts and video evidence from multiple angles, Boudin’s office recently dropped charges against the teen, citing a “lack of DNA evidence,” KABC reported.
Rachel Marshall, Boudin’s director of communications, said the district attorney’s office is “legally prohibited from discussing anything related to a juvenile case.”
Marshall did not respond to questions about the status of the cases against the two adult suspects, KABC reported.
The victim denounced the district attorney’s decision to drop the charges against the teen.
“That is truly pathetic,” she told KABC. “Give a bunch of thieves some gloves and let them loose to do whatever they want and to enjoy stolen money.”
The good Samaritan who helped her said he is also left wondering how the teen was allowed to walk free.
“I really put myself in a position where I could have lost my life,” he told KABC. “I would have hoped we could have seen some kind of justice.”
“I believe in restorative justice and I understand Chesa has a model but…his way of going about it is not working,” the witness added.
Boudin, 40, is the son of Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, two members of The Weather Underground who were convicted of murdering two police officers and a Brinks security guard during an armed robbery in 1981, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
Boudin was endorsed by Presidential hopeful U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), singer John Legend, and the co-founders of Black Lives Matter, as well as several first-term radical liberal prosecutors including Chicago’s beleaguered Cook County Prosecutor Kim Foxx and Philadelphia’s cop-hating district attorney, Larry Krasner.
Activist Shaun King’s Real Justice PAC and a lot of other money from outside the state of California filled the public defender’s campaign coffers, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Boudin was 14 months old when both of his parents left him with a sitter while they committed an armored car robbery in upstate New York, NBC News reported.
After his parents went to prison, he was raised by The Weather Underground’s leaders, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, in a life of privilege that led him to Yale University.
After college, Boudin won a Rhodes scholarship and then worked as a translator for the late Communist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, according to NBC News.
“Growing up, I had to go through a metal detector and steel gates just to give my parents a hug,” Boudin said in one of his campaign videos.
His mother, Kathy Boudin, was released from prison in 2003 after serving 22 years for the murders, but his father, David Gilbert, remains behind bars serving life in prison, NBC News reported.
The public defender ran his campaign on criminal justice reform, claiming that he was also a “victim” of his parents’ armed robbery in 1981 that left three people dead, two of them police officers.
Boudin has claimed he was motivated to run for office because he has experienced the results of the “destructive effects of mass incarceration,” NBC News reported.
He promptly fired several senior prosecutors just two days after he was sworn into office in January of 2020, KTVU reported.
“I had to make difficult staffing decisions today in order to put in place a management team that will help me accomplish the work I committed to do for San Francisco,” Boudin said in a written statement released after the terminations became public.
In February, the notoriously anti-police district attorney announced a host of criminal justice reforms that allowed, among other things, gun-toting criminals to stay on the streets.
Boudin said that San Francisco prosecutors will no longer charge suspects for contraband found by police during “stop-and-frisk” searches conducted during the course of another interaction, KTVU reported at the time.
That means that going forward, if officers find a gun or drugs inside a vehicle while conducting a traffic stop for a vehicle violation, for example, the district attorney’s office won’t charge the person for the illegal gun or drugs, KTVU reported.
Boudin also announced that the district attorney’s office would no longer apply California’s three-strike law.
And he made good on a campaign promise to do away with gang enhancements to charges that frequently put gang members behind bars for many years longer than called for by the crime they committed, according to KTVU.
“Today we take action. We send a message that is loud and clear to the police department and to communities of color. We will no longer participate in, condone, tolerate or amplify racist police tactics,” Boudin declared at the time.
Boudin is currently the subject of a recall effort.
