A 26-year-old man was found guilty of first-degree murder on Monday for killing a man in the Mission District back in 2014, according to the Chronicle.
Justin Howard was convicted of “first-degree murder with a firearm enhancement” for the June 2014 killing of 25-year-old Dominic Anderson, at a time when the Mission saw two murders over the span of four days.
The day of the shooting, Howard drove his car next to Anderson’s parked vehicle near 15th and Mission at 9:15 a.m. and shot into Anderson’s car, striking him in the torso multiple times. Howard fled in his four-door sedan and called the police later that day, claiming his car had been stolen the day before.
Witnesses, however, remembered a distinctive purple car, and police corroborated this description with video footage from the Bay Bridge that caught him passing through the toll gate 15 minutes before the shooting, according to the Chronicle. He was arrested a few weeks later at his girlfriend’s Richmond home.
The public defender who represented Howard said she was disappointed in the jury’s decision, telling the Chronicle that the jury “traded reasonable doubt for convenient assumptions” when glossing over several inconsistencies of the case, like witness testimony that the shooter was bald though Howard was not.