How story by deputy unraveled
Ballistics, video evidence sparked suspicion of claim
A Santa Clara County sheriff’s deputy’s claim that he was targeted in a drive-by shooting near the Uvas Reservoir last year unraveled largely because of peculiar bullet casing placement and no evidence that another car was on the same road, according to an investigation fueling charges that he faked the attack.
The nearly yearlong probe by the agency and District Attorney’s Office found that some .380 bullet casings thought to be from the assailant were on the wrong side of Deputy Sukhdeep Gill’s patrol SUV if his accounts were to be believed. A re-creation of the shooting concluded it was much more likely the shots were fired by someone standing rather than from a moving vehicle.
Investigators’ suspicions were compounded by an absence of any clear sign, from surveillance
video and witness accounts, that another car was either following Gill’s patrol vehicle or was even on the lightly traveled Uvas Road around the time the attack was reported the night of Jan. 31, 2020.
“Based on several inconsistencies including evidence placement at the crime scene, video surveillance, shooting reconstruction, and witness statements, I believed I needed to speak to Deputy Gill to see if he could explain the discrepancies,” Sgt. Joseph Piazza Jr. wrote last October, at the end of a 310-page police report accompanying the criminal complaint for Gill.
That statement appears to be the prologue for an internal review that led to charges filed last week alleging that Gill, for reasons still unclear, shot and destroyed his body camera and put three more rounds into his patrol SUV, then radioed
in to dispatchers that he had been shot at and had returned fire at his attackers.
Gill, 27, was booked Friday at the Main Jail in San Jose on charges of felony vandalism and a misdemeanor count of filing a false police report. He since has been released. His attorney, Nicole Pifari, has declined to comment on the charges, citing a need to receive and review the evidence against him.
Gill told his supervisors and investigators that he had pulled over on the northbound side of Uvas Road near Wallace Place, just south of the reservoir parking lot, so that he could urinate.
He reported that soon after, a car approached, then the driver turned its headlights off. Four gunshots soon followed, he claimed, with one bullet hitting him squarely in the chest — destroying his body camera — and three others hitting his SUV. Gill also reported he fired two retaliatory shots with his 9 mm service pistol, around the same time
he fell down an embankment.
A massive manhunt followed, with deputies stopping a handful of vehicles that resembled Gill’s description of a gray or silver Honda sedan, but quickly ruling them out of suspicion. Investigators later would impound and examine two vehicles, one found in San Jose and another in the Morgan Hill area, because they were seemingly abandoned and had either bullet holes or similar damage. But they were deemed not to have been involved.
Sheriff Laurie Smith had a news conference a few days after the shooting in which she said “it was an ambush” and praised the deputy’s bravery, while an investigative lieutenant called it “a targeted attack” and a “close call.”
But in the ensuing weeks and months, scant evidence materialized to help investigators prove that another car was even on the road before or after the gunfire. That was crystallized by detectives’ review of video footage recorded by a
Uvas Road resident’s security camera, which showed Gill’s SUV entering the area but no other vehicles coming through in either direction until at least 10 minutes after the shooting.
The police report states that the county crime lab determined that the bullets purportedly fired at Gill were Remington Golden Saber hollow-point ammunition rounds that no longer are manufactured. The report also states that Gill had two .380 pistols registered in his name, but there is no mention of whether any matching weapons or ammunition were recovered in a search of Gill’s home in October.
Three months prior, detectives reported trying to conduct surveillance on Gill and trailed him as he left work and headed home, partly to confirm where he lived. They stated, however, that Gill drove on the freeway at 120 mph and on city streets toward his San Jose home at 80 mph, frustrating their efforts to follow him.
Perhaps the most compelling cause for suspicion was the inexplicable location of two .380 bullet casings recovered on the passenger side of the patrol SUV, well away from the roadway, and no markings to suggest that they had been inadvertently kicked over or displaced by a car tire. According to the investigative report, detectives went to their gun range and attempted to re-create the shooting in accordance with Gill’s account, but found inconsistencies.
Gill’s body camera, the only part of him that was hit, could offer no additional clarity on what happened. Detectives were told by a company engineer that “the camera’s microprocessor was damaged” and that “since the microprocessor is needed to decrypt the data on the memory chip, he was unable to retrieve any data.”