The young man with the 1,000-yard stare looked through the officer as he asked: “Can you kill me?”
“What?” California Highway Patrol Officer Tony Pacheco said he remembers responding. Pacheco made the comments while testifying in a downtown San Diego Courtroom.
He said the young man, blood trickling down his face, asked the question again.
“Can you kill me?”
“No, man,” Pacheco said, recalling his words at the time of the incident. He said the young man had just crashed his car, and the officer decided to call for an ambulance.
Pacheco said in court that he reached for his CHP radio. That’s when the young man lunged for Pacheco’s gun.
Testifying Friday in San Diego Superior Court, Pacheco detailed the struggle with the young man on the side of Interstate 8 in Mission Valley in rush hour traffic earlier this year. Pacheco was shot.
“I was so convinced I was going to die,” Pacheco told the judge. “So convinced.”
Yuhao Du, 25, has pleaded not guilty to attempted murder of a police officer and other charges. If convicted, he faces about 40 years to life in prison. He was in court Friday for a preliminary hearing.
At the end of the hearing, which ran less than two hours, Judge Aaron Katz found that prosecutors had presented enough evidence to order Du to stand trial. No trial date has been set for Du, a UC San Diego physics graduate student at the time of the shooting.
Aside from the standard not-guilty plea, Du has also pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, but that was not a focus of the hearing. A defendant’s mental state factors in only at trial. It does not play a role during a preliminary hearing, where a judge determines if there is enough evidence for the case to move forward.
However, Du’s mental health did come up during the hearing. Du has been diagnosed with schizophrenia, according to testimony, and had spent the weeks leading up to the shooting at various psychiatric hospitals in the region.
About 6:15 p.m. April 27, a black Audi crashed into the center divide along Interstate 8 under an Interstate 805 overpass. Pacheco was dispatched to the scene. He found the driver outside the wrecked car.
Pacheco testified he asked the driver his name. No response. Pacheco said he asked for identification, but there was no response.
“He had a blank stare on his face, a 1,000-yard stare,” Pacheco told the judge. “It appeared he was staring right through me.”
The officer thought the driver might be drunk or on drugs. And then, according to Pacheco, the man began to mumble: “I want to kill myself.”
Pacheco said the man asked the officer to kill him — twice. Pacheco recalled reaching for his radio to call dispatch. He said the man lunged forward.
When Pacheco looked down, he said, he saw both of the man’s hands on the officer’s holstered gun.
“He had this death grip on it,” Pacheco said. “He had 110 percent energy. It felt like superhuman strength.”
Keeping his right hand over his assailant’s hands as they fought over the still-holstered gun, Pacheco said he pushed the man against the concrete center divide. The officer used his left hand to punch the man four times in the face — blows so hard the officer tore a ligament in his hand.
Pacheco was about to throw the man to the ground.
“I heard a loud pop. My ears are ringing. I felt this extreme pain on my leg. … Warm liquid running down my leg. It was my blood,” Pacheco testified.
“My gun was still holstered,” he said. “My right hand never left his hands, and they were on my pistol.”
Pacheco, fearing an artery had been hit, said he believed he was going to die.
“My only chance for survival is winning that fight,” he said. “For the next several seconds, I fight for my life.”
Pacheco said he grew weaker. The assailant grew stronger.
Backup was not coming. The attack happened before Pacheco made the radio call.
But people passing by saw the struggle, stopped and intervened, pulling the assailant off the officer and wrapping the officer’s leg with a tourniquet. Someone handed Pacheco his police radio, which had fallen off during the struggle.
“11-99. 11-99. I got shot in the leg. I am bleeding out,” Pacheco remembered saying. 11-99 is police code for “officer down.”
The aftermath of the incident was captured in several cellphone videos, although none were played in court Friday.
Pacheco said he suffered a gunshot that went through his right thigh, missing the femur and artery. He released from a hospital two days after the shooting. But blood clots in his leg and lungs forced two more hospital stays in the weeks that followed. He is still recovering.
Du was arrested at the scene. CHP Officer Bradley Search testified that he questioned Du for three hours that night. The investigator said that, like Pacheco, he also saw the blank stare. He, too, thought Du was under the influence of alcohol or drugs that night. He said Du’s breath test showed zero alcohol.
Search said Du told him that he’d grabbed Pacheco’s gun in self-defense, “troubled by the way Pacheco was looking at him,” and fearing Pacheco was going to hurt him.
He said Du told him he had been able to wriggle his finger onto the trigger of the pistol and pull it during the struggle. He said he’d tried to shoot again, but the gun was jammed.
On cross-examination, Search said Du also said during questioning that the shooting was a mistake and he didn’t want to shoot the officer.
Search also testified that Du told him he’d been hearing voices that commanded to take certain actions.
He said Du told him he had experimented with inhaling nitrous oxide — also known as whippets, a recreational drug — but had stopped using it in recent months. That’s when the voices returned.
Du told Search a voice had ordered him to crash his car into the divider that night.