Airman charged in killings of federal officer, deputy
In an eight-day span, an Air Force sergeant fatally shot a federal security officer and wounded his partner outside a U.S. courthouse and ambushed and killed a California sheriff’s deputy and injured four other officers, federal authorities said Tuesday.
In announcing murder and attempted murder charges in the shooting of the security personnel, authorities alleged Staff Sgt. Steven Carrillo, 32, had ties to the far-right, anti-government “boogaloo” movement and that the plot to target them was hatched a day earlier during an online chat with an accomplice and a third person.
David Patrick Underwood, 53, was killed and his partner was wounded as they guarded the Ronald V. Dellums Federal Building in Oakland while a large demonstration over the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis was underway nearby. Officials said Carrillo used the protest as cover for the crime and for his escape.
“Pat Underwood was murdered because he wore a uniform,” David Anderson, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California, said at a news conference at the Dellums building.
Department of Homeland Security Acting Secretary Chad Wolf called the killing an assassination.
Carrillo’s attorney, Jeffrey Strotter, said he doesn’t have any evidence his client was in contact with anyone in the boogaloo movement, which the lawyer called a terrorist organization that uses social media to reach out “to vulnerable and possibly susceptible individuals who may be receptive to their messages of hate and destruction.”
Carrillo “has personally expressed to me his sadness and sympathy for everyone that has been harmed by the tragic events in his case,” Stotter said.
Carrillo separately faces state charges in the June 6 fatal shooting of Santa Cruz County sheriff’s Sgt. Damon Gutzwiller and the wounding of four other officers in the community of Ben Lomond outside the beachfront city of Santa Cruz south of San Francisco.
Federal authorities say the same homemade AR-15style rifle was used in the two shootings.
Carrillo was stationed at Travis Air Force Base northeast of Oakland where he was a leader in an elite military security force and had no record of disciplinary issues. Federal authorities say they linked him to the boogaloo movement from social media posts and from phrases he had written in his own blood when he was arrested following the ambush of the deputy.