Video reportedly shows man walk to car, stab man

Defense: stab to heart not murder, but manslaughter

On Sept. 18, 2019, 34-year-old Andre Qualls was sitting in his green Ford Explorer at a Chevron on the 300 block of Grand Avenue when a man walked up, stabbed Qualls in the heart through the open driver's side window, and walked away.

The suspect, 55-year-old Anthony C. Smith, would later confess to the crime. But Smith claimed that as he was driving alongside Qualls before the stabbing, he recognized him as the man who robbed Smith of $12,000 weeks earlier, and noticed Qualls was laughing at him.

“It just felt like something took control of me,” Smith told police, according to a transcript of his Dec. 13, 2022, preliminary hearing. He later told detectives that after the stabbing he “went bonkers” with guilt and wanted to come clean, though he waited until police identified him from video surveillance to do so.

Smith's confession — and the reasoning behind the fatal stabbing — led his attorney to argue that it was a textbook case of manslaughter, not murder. Under state law, a homicide committed under what's legally defined as “the heat of passion” is considered a less serious act of manslaughter. This is in contrast to second-degree murder, which still requires that the killer be shown to have weighed the consequences of their actions.

“Mr. Smith made unequivocally and repeated statements that he essentially acted in the heat of passion and I submit that those statements by him are uncontradicted in the record,” defense attorney Marvin Lew said at the hearing.

Judge Clarence Don Clay, though, ordered Smith to stand trial and said the selfserving statement on its own wasn't enough to convince him otherwise.

“I don't know if this statement is contrived. I don't know if he consulted people what to say … It's not like he stabbed somebody and he walked in the police department and said, `I did this and I did it because somebody robbed me,' ” Clay said.

Smith has been in jail since October 2019, roughly two weeks after he allegedly killed Qualls. His preliminary hearing took more than three years to take place, and there is still no trial date in sight. Smith is next due in court for a status update in late March, court records show.

The stabbing was so nonchalant that eyewitnesses weren't even sure they'd seen an act of violence. One eyewitness who was only a few feet away from the homicide told police he was pumping his gas just one pump behind Qualls' Ford when a man walked up, reached through the driver's seat window, and appeared to pull out a “silver object about a foot long.”

In reality, video surveillance would later confirm that Smith walked up to the vehicle holding the knife, casually stabbed Qualls in the chest, and walked away, according to police testimony. Qualls never left the vehicle. He died from the single stab wound in the heart.

In his subsequent confession, Smith claimed that weeks earlier he'd been washing his car in another part of Oakland when he was robbed for $12,000 by Qualls. When police searched a hotel room where Smith was staying at the time, they found nearly $200,000 in cash, which Smith said was money he'd recently inherited from a relative.

The day of the stabbing, Smith told police he was driving on Grand Avenue when heard someone honking their horn, and turned to see Qualls laughing at him. He denied following the Ford — as police believe he did — and said he simply stopped his car and walked over when he saw Qualls stop to get gas. The whole thing felt like an out-of-body experience, he told detectives, according to the preliminary hearing transcript.

“I wasn't myself,” Smith said.