Man shot, killed by police was not armed
Tovar Jr. was seen as ‘violent’ and reaching for something, officials say
SAN JOSE >> A Gilroy man who was shot and killed by police at a San Jose apartment complex last week was unarmed during the fatal confrontation, which came after multiple attempts by police to arrest him in connection with a homicide and two other shootings in South Santa Clara County.
David Tovar Jr., 27, died Thursday after San Jose police officers confronted him in the courtyard of an apartment complex on La Pala Drive near McKee Road in the city’s east foothills. Police contend that he was reaching into his waistband on a second floor landing, as officers looked on from a ground level courtyard, when they shot him.
Tovar was not carrying a gun, police confirmed Monday. But they were on heightened alert, they said, because Tovar was suspected of a series of violent crimes dating back to last year and allegedly stated intentions to commit more shootings, with police officers among his next targets.
“We knew this was a violent individual who had been on a violent crime spree, with multiple victims in different jurisdictions in the South County area,” acting Chief David Tindall said at a news conference Monday.
Over the weekend, Tovar’s father helped lead a vigil at the Villa Fairlane apartment complex, lamented that the family had been left in the dark about the circumstances of the shooting, and refuted police assertions about his son’s violent history.
Raj Jayadev, whose civil rights nonprofit Silicon Valley De-Bug helped organize the vigil, said the shooting, and confirmation Tovar was unarmed, can’t be overshadowed by the criminal past police described.
“This is a repeated pattern out of a police killing handbook,” he said, “to try and justify a murder after the fact by vilifying the victim and creating a narrative that gives the impression he deserved to be killed.”
At the Monday news conference, San Jose police laid out a timeline of reported crimes tied to Tovar that were also under investigation in Gilroy, Morgan Hill, and by the California Highway Patrol. That timeline included more than half a dozen robberies and auto thefts encompassing San Jose and those South County cities between April and October last year, and the recovery of guns in at least two stolen vehicles linked to Tovar.
Tindall said Monday that the crimes implicated Tovar, a parolee and documented gang member, through DNA, video and eyewitness evidence. In late December, Tindall said a stolen vehicle driven by Tovar was recovered in South San Jose with a stolen shotgun inside.
Tovar was a primary suspect in the Jan. 3 fatal shooting of 35-year-old San Benito County resident Russell Anthony Lewis on Fairview Drive in Gilroy, and was suspected in a shootout on the same street two days earlier. He was also being investigated in a Jan. 5 attack in Morgan Hill where he was suspected of using a shotgun to shoot an unhoused man, who was seriously injured but survived.
On Jan. 14, Gilroy police tried to arrest Tovar in that city, but he reportedly used his car to ram police vehicles out of the way to escape. Earlier that day, police said they got a 911 call reporting that Tovar was armed with rifles and handguns, and was looking to kill a police officer.
On Thursday, a San Jose police undercover unit tracked Tovar to the Villa Fairlane complex, and tried to arrest him outside, but he instead ran back into the property’s courtyard and made his way to a second-floor walkway.
Tindall said an officer monitoring Tovar reported that he “appeared to be holding something within his waistband area and his front jacket area,” and that officers repeated commands at him to “put your hands up and stop running.”
Three officers, armed with rifles entered the courtyard, with Tovar above them, which Tindall said gave Tovar “a distinct advantage against officers on the ground.”
“Tovar then ran along the walkway toward one officer who could see Tovar pulling what he believed to the butt of a handgun from his jacket,” he said.
That prompted three officers to open fire, and Tovar was hit and fell to the floor. He was taken to a hospital, where he died.
Tindall said that after the shooting, police recovered a black-and-silver cellphone on the floor next to where Tovar wounded, and a screwdriver in his pocket, but no gun.
The officers who fired at Tovar were not identified at the news conference Monday, and were described as having between 13 and 15 years of police experience. Tindall said he had no immediate plans to release their names “due to the covert nature of their assignments,” and that decision might be revisited in the future.
He added that police planned to release officers’ body-camera video of the shooting within 45 days in accordance with state law, so that “residents and public will be able to see what the officers saw.”
“The investigation will speak for itself,” Tindall said. “The facts will speak for themselves.”
Tovar died in San Jose’s first police shooting of 2021. Five such shootings were reported last year, one of them fatal.
This type of police shooting could also compel an investigation by the state Attorney General’s office in accordance with the passage last year of Assembly Bill 1506, which applies to police shootings of unarmed civilians. But the law might not take practical affect until mid-year because of a needed budgetary allocation.