Man hailed as hero ends up behind bars

SAN FRANCISCO » On April 19, 2018, Alberto Carrillo’s future was looking bright.

Despite past criminal convictions and spending more than half his life behind bars, he had found steady employment as a monitor for San Francisco’s Pit Stop program, which offers publicly accessible bathrooms and other services intended to help homeless people. Carrillo was being hailed as a hero by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for saving the lives of two people who were on the brink of overdosing on heroin.

But six months later, Carrillo would undergo a personal tragedy that unraveled his success and ultimately would send him to federal prison for four years. His story is spelled out in court records, which explain how Carrillo went from being celebrated by city leaders to returning to incarceration.

It all started when his older brother, 39-yearold Francisco Carrillo, was gunned down at a homeless encampment in Richmond, the victim of a seemingly random crime. The killing took place in October 2018, and a Richmond resident was later charged with murdering Carrillo.

Alberto Carrillo, his friends and family would tell police, was inconsolable after his brother’s death. Still grief-stricken nine days later and after a day of heavy drinking, he made a serious lapse in judgment, pulling a pistol and firing 13 times into the air.

No one was hit by the gunfire, but prosecutors say that was just dumb luck. Carrillo was identified as the shooter and arrested. The Northern California U.S. Attorney’s Office took over Carrillo’s case, charging him with felony gun possession.

Because he had a prior conviction for gun possession, he faced a decade or more behind bars. In July, after Carrillo pleaded guilty, it came time to determine his prison term.

Federal sentencing guidelines had recommended a sentence of 63 to 78 months, but the assistant U.S. Attorney on the case came up with 51 months. Carrillo’s attorney asked for a year and a day, to be served concurrent with Carrillo’s sentence for violating his probation.

On July 19, U.S. District Judge Yvonne Rodgers settled on a 46-month term, just shy of four years, and allowed the probation violation to run concurrently.

Under federal rules, Carrillo will be required to serve nearly all of his sentence. This is in stark contrast to state sentencing for crimes such as gun possession, which offers

up to a 50% sentence reduction for good behavior.

Federal prosecutors acknowledged Carrillo had acted heroically when he saved two people from separate deadly heroin overdoses. In one, Carrillo burst into a Pit Stop bathroom and helped a man who was overdosing. Hours later, he recognized a passerby displaying similar symptoms and alerted first responders.

Three weeks after that, Carrillo received certificates of honor from the city of San Francisco and, later, a 2018 EMS Community Services Award from the San Francisco Emergency Medical Services Agency, according to court records. He told the San Francisco Chronicle that he had spent 17 of his 31 years on Earth behind bars but was optimistic about the future.

“A devastating incident, not likely to be repeated, brought about Mr. Carrillo’s fall,” deputy public defender John Reichmuth wrote in his sentencing memo for Carrillo.

He later said Carrillo was “under extreme emotional duress and the influence of alcohol” when he fired a gun into the air.

“Alberto made a bad decision, one he recognizes and it is killing him. He has a career on the way, he works six days a week. He has changed, he is a family man not the street man you guys have him documented to be,” Carrillo’s fiancee wrote in one of several support letters submitted by Reichmuth.

But Assistant U.S. Attorney Frank Riebli argued that not taking Carrillo’s gun possession seriously sent the wrong message.

“Robert Heinlein said, ‘An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.’ Some people think Heinlein was a great writer, and he is certainly better known than the undersigned government counsel. But he was wrong about guns,” Riebli wrote in the sentencing memo. “Rather than encouraging politeness, the proliferation of firearms in our communities has come to mean that more people get shot because of bad manners.”

But Riebli acknowledged that it was “tough to reconcile” that “the same person could be responsible for these two acts.”

“The government’s position is that Carrillo should be punished for the first, but receive leniency because of the second. If not

for Carrillo’s good deeds, the government would recommend a high-end sentence, or an upward variance, consecutive to whatever sentence he received for the supervised release violation, because this is Carrillo’s second federal conviction for unlawful possession of a firearm,” Riebli wrote.

In January, two months after Alberto Carrillo was arrested on the gun possession charge, Contra Costa County prosecutors charged Nebrith Rodriguez Rios, 32, with murdering Francisco Carrillo. After the charges were filed, it was revealed that police believe Francisco Carrillo also was attempting to save a life when he was killed.

Prosecutors say Rios had burned down a homeless woman’s tent the day of the shooting. Francisco Carrillo, who also was homeless and lived nearby, saw the fire, assumed the woman was inside the tent and rushed to help. That’s when Rios allegedly shot Carrillo and another man, who survived.

Rios was charged with murder, attempted murder and arson. He remains in custody as the case makes its way through the court system.