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The Alameda County District Attorney’s Office has determined a Pleasanton police officer acted in lawful self-defense when he shot and killed a local man who advanced on police with what turned out to be a realistic-looking BB gun in May 2017, and the officer will not face criminal charges, prosecutors revealed on Friday afternoon.
Pleasanton resident Shannon Edward Estill was shot twice by Pleasanton Police Department Officer Keith Batt after charging out of his garage toward the officer with a black, pistol-sized BB gun while Batt and other officers were outside Estill’s Burgundy Drive house responding to a domestic incident, according to deputy district attorney Chris Infante.
“The credible and admissible evidence shows that Officer Keith Batt acted in what he actually and reasonably believed to be self-defense and defense of others,” Infante wrote. “The examined evidence does not support the contention that the shooting of Mr. Estill was criminal.”
The full 25-page DA’s Office report, completed Aug. 14 and obtained by the Weekly on Friday afternoon, includes interviews with the three Pleasanton officers on scene and Estill’s wife and daughter, a summary of body camera footage from some officers and an overview of an Alameda County Coroner’s Bureau autopsy.
Batt, now in his 17th year with Pleasanton police, fired six shots in all from his department-issued semiautomatic rifle as an intoxicated Estill — who did not respond to police commands to yield — was running to within 10 feet away with what the officer thought was a real handgun, Infante said.
Estill, 58, was shot once in the chest initially and once in the head seconds later — both ultimately fatal wounds — in what at the time marked the second fatal officer-involved shooting for Pleasanton in as many years.
“This was a tragic event for all involved,” Police Chief Dave Spiller told the Weekly on Friday. “With the conclusion of the investigation by the District Attorney’s Office and the release of the D.A.’s report, our hope is that the Estill family can find closure and continue in their healing process.”
Batt was joined by another veteran officer and an officer-in-training in responding to the Estill house on Burgundy Drive just after 11:30 a.m. on May 20, 2017.
Police were dispatched there after receiving a call from Estill’s wife amid the domestic incident. Fearing for their safety, the wife and teenage daughter locked themselves in an upstairs bedroom and the wife told police her husband was in the garage where he had access to firearms.
That marked the second time Pleasanton police were called out to the house on that morning because of Estill’s behavior and his third run-in with law enforcement in less than 24 hours — information revealed for the first time publicly in the DA’s report, which described the series of events and evidence from the entire day.
Estill, who had been battling with alcoholism especially over the previous year, was arrested on suspicion of public intoxication around 12:30 p.m. on May 19, 2017 when a California Highway Patrol officer saw him staggering on a street in Castro Valley.
The Pleasanton man was booked into Santa Rita Jail in Dublin around 1:30 p.m., and then released from custody on a citation just before 1 a.m. the next morning.
Estill returned to his house about an hour later and was making a ruckus outside, where his wife found him intoxicated and bloody. She called Pleasanton police around 2:05 a.m. after reporting her husband grabbed her, later threatened to kill her and was in the garage where he kept his guns in a safe.
Police soon arrived, detained him and had him transported to Eden Medical Center in Castro Valley for treatment. The wife said she didn’t want her husband arrested, but police obtained an emergency protective order from the court barring Estill from coming within 100 yards of his wife and daughter.
An officer went to Eden but did not arrest Estill because he was being admitted to the hospital. Police at the time were unable to confiscate the firearms from Estill’s garage gun safe because the door was wedged in by a parked car that couldn’t be moved — they were told the guns were unloaded with no ammunition.
Estill was released from the hospital at 10:50 a.m., arrived back to the house 40 minutes later acting erratically and intoxicated, and gained entry to the garage, at which point the wife and daughter locked themselves in the master bedroom and called police.
Batt responded to the scene with Officer Brian Jewell, who was in field training supervised by Batt, and they were met by Officer Lisa Cavellini.
The officers began to walk around the property, with Batt and Cavellini armed with pistols and Jewell drawing his Taser. As Batt moved to the open side door to the garage and shouted for Estill to come out, officers heard the sounds of a shotgun being racked and Batt saw the muzzle pointed at him through the doorway.
The officers immediately retreated to the front of the house, where the main garage door was shut and two cars were parked in the driveway.
Jewell went toward a neighbor’s open garage for scene control, Cavellini took a post to the left part of the driveway and Batt ran to his patrol car to grab his duty rifle instead of the pistol.
The garage door then opened and Cavellini told Estill to show his hands. A rifle-armed Batt moved toward the driveway but Estill came out of the garage quickly toward Batt.
Batt yelled “Hands up” but Estill, who said nothing to police during this encounter, continued to move toward the officer while pointing a black gun, running between the cars in the driveway.
When Estill got within 10 feet, Batt fired five shots — one struck Estill in the chest and four hit the parked cars. Batt fell backward as he was backpedaling. He sat up and saw Estill on the ground but could not locate the gun and still viewed Estill as a threat. The officer fired a sixth shot, which hit Estill in the head.
The 58-year-old man died at the scene.
Batt told investigators in an interview that night, “He fell down but I’m on my back completely exposed and I’m thinking, if I just hit him in the knee … he might just shoot Lisa or shoot this way or shoot me, and so I came up, I still perceived him to be a threat.”
“There was no option but to shoot until he was not a threat. All he had to do is get one lucky shot on me, on Lisa, on the trainee,” Batt said.
After the shooting, police discovered the gun Estill held was actually a black BB gun that had no markings to distinguish its appearance from a real firearm. They also found guns and ammunition in the garage. Estill did not fire any weapons at officers.
Batt’s body camera footage corroborated the description he gave to investigators and showed the three-second gap between the initial shots and the final one.
Cavellini’s body camera could only see Batt during the shooting because her view was blocked out by the Jeep in the driveway during the quick exchange. Jewell was retreating toward a neighbor’s open garage to tell her to go back inside, but his body camera footage cut off right before the shooting due to an apparent battery problem.
Estill’s wife and daughter, who remained in the upstairs bedroom and on the phone with emergency dispatch during the incident, were uninjured. No officers were hurt, and there were no neighbors near enough to witness the shooting.
The autopsy revealed the first shot to hit Estill would’ve been fatal, causing severe damage to the right lung, heart and liver. The second shot caused massive brain damage and numerous skull fractures. Toxicology testing found he had alcohol in his system.
Batt was placed on administrative leave in the immediate aftermath of the incident, as is practice in officer-involved shootings. It is unclear whether he was on leave for the entire 15-month DA’s investigation, but Spiller confirmed Batt has remained employed by Pleasanton police.
Batt is well-known in law enforcement circles in the Bay Area. He gained attention as a rookie officer with Oakland police as a whistleblower in the department’s so-called “Riders” police misconduct case involving other Oakland officers in 2000. He joined Pleasanton police the next year and has remained since.
Estill’s death was the last fatal officer-involved shooting for Pleasanton police, but it was preceded by a fatal incident just under two years earlier downtown. Prior to that, Pleasanton police hadn’t had an officer-involved shooting of any kind since 2005 — the department’s previous fatal shooting was 2000.
In the 2015 incident, San Jose resident John Deming Jr. was shot and killed by then-Officer Daniel Kunkel in the early-morning hours of July 5 during an altercation after the 19-year-old man reportedly tried to flee from police who were responding to a burglar alarm and found him acting erratically inside the Specialty Sales Classics car dealership on First Street.
The DA’s Office cleared Kunkel of criminal charges, deeming the officer acted in lawful self-defense. Deming’s family sued the police department for wrongful death, and the city settled the federal civil case for $285,000 and no admission of wrongdoing.
Pleasanton police did have an arrestee die following an altercation with officers earlier this month.
Jacob Bauer, 38, died at a local hospital while in police custody Aug. 1 after allegedly acting erratically in a grocery store and then fighting officers who were trying to detain him in the Oak Hills Shopping Center. Officers used Tasers to control Bauer, who showed signs of respiratory distress in an ambulance after his arrest, police said. That investigation is ongoing
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Thank you Officer Batt for your service. You were put in an awful situation where you had to make a split decision to defend yourself and others from a perceived lethal threat.
From everything I’ve read, the deceased was a good man who had experienced personal difficulties, including alcoholism, and had made mistakes. It is unfortunate that he put his family and Officer Batt and others in this tragic situation.
Officer Batt will have to live with this incident and it will likely occupy a place in his mind for the rest of his life. That’s a heavy burden to bear. In my view, we don’t pay cops nearly enough for what we ask them to do.