Felony charges dropped over cop’s warrantless search of bag

SAN FRANCISCO » Federal prosecutors here have dropped felony ammunition-possession charges against a Daly City man after a judge ruled police had violated his rights by searching a bag during a mental-health call, court records show.

The defendant, a 40-year-old man, was charged with being a felon in possession of ammunition, stemming from a July 2020 domestic violence call in which his wife reported he was “not like himself at all” and assaulting her elderly parents. When officers arrived, the man was pacing in the backyard with a duffel bag and told police he wanted to do an “exorcism” on his wife’s parents, according to court records.

Police placed him in a mental-health hold, then searched the duffel bag and found “an M80 firework, a loaded, unserialized 9 mm handgun with a large-capacity magazine, and 85 rounds of ammunition,” according court records.

But there is no evidence on the record that the officer — identified in court records as Officer Matthew Lajoie — fulfilled the necessary requirements to search the bag without a warrant, U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg wrote in his July order.

“At no point was (the defendant) advised he was being placed on a (mental health) hold, or of the purpose such a hold serves; at no point was he provided with the name of the mental health facility to which he would be taken, or the fact that he was ‘not under criminal arrest’; and at no point did anyone seek or receive his consent for a search of the duffel bag, let alone offer to leave the bag in the custody of his nearby wife, with whom on-the-scene officers were in contemporaneous contact,” Seeborg wrote.

A week after Seeborg’s order, the man was released from jail, per a defense motion. Eleven days after that, prosecutors moved to drop all charges.