Several San Francisco police officers piled onto a 23-year-old inside his Bayview bedroom and “punched” him repeatedly during a racially-motivated 2025 arrest, the public defender’s office alleged in a complaint filed with the city’s police watchdog department on Wednesday.
The officers “slammed” another man into the cement and, at one point, pepper-sprayed a woman in a wheelchair when she tried to defend her brother, wrote Brian Cox, head of the public defender’s integrity unit, in a letter to Paul Henderson, executive director of the Department of Police Accountability.
A San Francisco Police Department spokesperson declined to comment on the open complaint. The charges against both men were later dismissed.
On Aug. 31, 2025, officers arrested two men — Carlos Espana-Quintanilla, 23, and his friend, a 22-year-old whose name the public defender’s office withheld — during a family gathering at 1270 Quesada Ave. in Hunter’s Point, according to the complaint.
An unspecified number of officers arrived at the house after the department received a midnight call from a woman in a car a quarter mile away. She contacted police after arguing with her boyfriend, who subsequently fled the car.
The woman told officers who responded to the scene that her boyfriend might have gone to his grandmother’s house on Quesada Avenue. She described him as a 5-foot-5-inch Black man wearing a black hoodie with red rhinestones, and black sweatpants.
Two officers, identified in the complaint as Johnson and Byrd, spotted the unnamed 22-year-old from their patrol car on a nearby street and ordered him to stop. The complaint described this man as 5-foot-2-inches, Black, and wearing a brown hoodie and white sweatpants.
Cox wrote that the officer’s decision to stop this man was an act of racial profiling without reasonable suspicion.
“The only overlapping characteristic between [that man] and the boyfriend is that they are both Black men and happen to be in the same neighborhood,” he wrote.
Johnson got out of the patrol car and then sprinted after the 22-year-old, who ran to 1270 Quesada Ave. This, the complaint said, was where the man’s friend Espana-Quintanilla lived.
“Johnson burst through the gate of the metal fence surrounding the home and grabbed [the 22-year-old] just as he got to the front door of the house,” Cox wrote.
The public defender said the officer did not have a warrant, and did not activate his body-worn camera when he stepped out of the patrol car.
“Visibly distressed at the chaotic scene unfolding outside their front door, Espana-Quintanilla, his family, and friends began yelling and screaming at officers, demanding to know what officers were doing,” Cox wrote.
Officer Johnson tried to pin the 22-year-old “against the side of the house,” while Officer Byrd “put both of his hands on Espana-Quintanilla,” who had grabbed his friend’s shirt, the complaint read. The officer “shoved him backward so hard he nearly fell,” it said.
Two minutes later, more officers arrived to separate the Espana-Quintanilla family from the 22-year-old, who repeatedly protested, “I didn’t do anything.”
Byrd, the complaint said, “slammed” the 22-year-old into the cement while restraining his hands.
He “was crying and bleeding from his mouth and nose” as he was taken to a police car, the complaint read, and later received medical care.
Byrd then returned to the house. Without warning, he “sprinted towards” Espana-Quintanilla, pushing past a closed metal gate and chasing Espana-Quintanilla into his bedroom, the complaint read.
There, Byrd “pushed him onto his bed, held him down, and punched him multiple times in the face” while Espana-Quintanilla’s mother watched.
Six more officers ran into the bedroom, the complaint continued. More than three of them also “knelt on and put their hands on Espana-Quintanilla, who was lying prone on the ground and crying out for help.”
Another officer kept Espana-Quintanilla’s sister, who uses a wheelchair, from interfering, purportedly spraying her with pepper spray in the process.
During a preliminary hearing, the court dismissed the charges against Espana-Quintanilla for resisting arrest and felony battery on an officer. A judge found that “officers had not acted lawfully” when entering his home, according to the public defender’s office.
Prosecutors dismissed the misdemeanor for resisting arrest that the unnamed 22-year-old was charged with, according to the public defender’s office.
Officers’ physical restraint of both men constituted excessive force, the public defender’s office said. The cops, Cox added, violated department policy when they failed to de-escalate the situation instead.
If we give SFPD a 14% raise, will we see more or fewer of these incidents? Will SFPD be encouraged or sated?
Does Officer Joel Aguayo work in the Bayview now?
Some of those that work forces…
Or is there another explanation apart from this obvious one?
SFPD brutalized Black people? I don’t believe it.
There are a few cops who aren’t Republican thugs. Only a few.
I expect now Jenkins will give the two officers medals of honor and Trump will counter with medals of freedom. How do we know those Black men weren’t terrorists hired by Iran to bomb SF gas stations? Worse, they fit the AI profile of progressive-homeless-mentally ill-drug addicts. Instead of innocent police, the City should employ more drones to eliminate the criminal population which has taken over the streets.