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Pleasanton resident Keith Bailey was minding his own business while doing some work on his car outside of his home on Neal Street early on a Saturday evening when he suddenly heard two gunshots coming from his neighbor’s residence.
He then said he saw a man walking out of his neighbor’s house and toward him. At first, Bailey said he didn’t feel intimidated and even tried asking the man what had happened. That’s when he said the stranger jumped into Bailey’s car.
At that moment, Bailey ran back into his house to tell his wife to call 911. When he went back outside, he said the assailant demanded the keys to the car and flashed his gun.
“That’s when I really kind of freaked out,” Bailey told the Weekly.
As Bailey paced around inside his home with the fear of not knowing if the suspect had made his way inside his house or not, he and his family were mainly wondering: Why weren’t their 911 calls going through and what’s taking the police so long to respond?
The attempted carjacking and ensuing suspect search that involved several police agencies near downtown Pleasanton on April 27 first started after a robbery took place at the Sunol Corners Little Market.
Market owner Juan Pablo Alvarado said he remembers the moments during and after the robbery as being chaotic.
“It was a crazy situation,” he told the Weekly.
After the robbery in Sunol, the suspects were believed to have traveled to Pleasanton where the incident involving Bailey unfolded. The Pleasanton Police Department was able to confirm on Monday that a primary suspect and an accomplice who got away from police in Pleasanton were in fact connected with the incident in Sunol.
Bailey said after the would-be carjacker flashed a gun, he ran back inside his house to protect his family where he quickly discovered that none of his kids or his wife had been able to get through to 911.
According to a screenshot of his daughter’s phone call history, she began calling 911 at 5:25 p.m. April 27 and for five minutes, each of her 10 calls were canceled. One outgoing call went out at 5:31 p.m. but Bailey said even that one did not go through.
He even said that as his wife was hiding in their backyard, their daughter jumped over their fence and ran in order to get to a better area to call the police, thinking it was an issue with the reception.
“I don’t cuss very often, but I was cussing up a storm,” Bailey said. “I’ve never felt like that before. Once he flashed that gun, it scared the tar out of me and the only thing I could (think was) I got to protect my family.”
He said in the end, he never did find out who was able to call 911 but eventually somebody did get through and police made it to their house. However, Bailey said given how close his house was to the PPD headquarters, he was not happy with how long it took for officers to get there.
Alvarado also said that he had trouble calling 911 after the robbery in Sunol.
He said he got the same busy line message three times and finally, it was one of his customers inside the market who was able to get through to 911. Even then, Alvarado said it took about 15 to 20 minutes for authorities to get to the scene.
But he doesn’t blame the deputies, he blames the 911 calling operation system for not working. “If the 911 system is not picking up, how are (officers) going to know?” Alvarado said.
PPD Lt. Erik Silacci told the Weekly as far as getting through to 911, he wasn’t sure how many calls got that busy signal but that when PPD has its several 911 lines overwhelmed, they have what are called rollover lines that they utilize.
He said in this case, however, it seems like it was a “technical issue with a few different causes and we are still trying to ascertain those causes.”
One potential cause, Silacci said, that PPD is floating around is that because of the Interstate 680 closure that took place that weekend, additional cars on city streets could have affected the cell towers.
Bailey said that after speaking with investigators who gave him more of a detailed timeline of the response time, he still had his concerns.
According to Bailey, PPD told him that the first call came in at 5:19 p.m. but dispatch didn’t receive the message until 5:25 p.m. He then said PPD didn’t get to his house until 5:31 p.m., which is over the four-minute mark that PPD has set as its emergency response time goal.
“We have a few different metrics we use, but overall response time is from the time a call is ready for dispatch — after a call taker has spoken with the reporting party and put the necessary information into our … system — until the time the first unit arrives on scene,” Silacci said. “In this incident we were on scene within 6 minutes.”
Silacci said PPD was also responding in support for the Sunol market incident and that getting from Sunol to Bailey’s house took a few minutes, which seems to have contributed to the delayed response time. He also said that other officers stationed throughout Pleasanton were also delayed because it was a busy Saturday.
“While we try to get there in four (minutes), six is not that bad,” Silacci said. “All in all that’s not a really bad response time.”
But for Bailey’s family, who had been trying to get through to 911 for much longer, it still felt like an eternity.
He also said that when the police finally did get there, he didn’t feel like they knew what was going on or what they were doing. He said at first officers didn’t seem to know what address to go to and that they were spending more time setting up a perimeter and taking pictures of his car’s license plate rather than checking in on his missing daughter who jumped the fence and his neighbor where the initial shots came from.
It wasn’t until later on that he found out through his neighbor that the suspect had jumped over the same fence his daughter leapt — although she jumped into his neighbor’s backyard and the suspect jumped into the driveway area to get away — which only made him wonder why the police were not doing more.
“It’s like they had no idea,” Bailey said. “They didn’t know what they were doing … they seemed so confused and not knowing what was going on.”
But Silacci said that PPD’s main concern was locating any suspects who were armed and setting a perimeter. He said based on the information they had at the time they suspected there were two, possibly three, subjects running through neighbors’ backyards and they knew that gunshots had been fired.
“We had at least three separate reporting parties, each providing us with information on direction of travel of the suspects, descriptions of the suspects and possible associated vehicles,” Silacci said. “When officers did set a perimeter, they were able to get first-hand information from some of those same reporting parties.”
Bailey said that overall he believes the case was mishandled and mentioned that in the past, PPD has responded quickly to other calls and done so in a better manner. This time, however, was different.
“When this is going on, we’re calling and there’s just nobody showing up,” Bailey said. “It was an eerie, eerie feeling … and of course scary at the same time.”
For Alvarado, he said he just wished that there would be better communications between different agencies when responding to an emergency, especially for rural areas such as Sunol. He said that given there were California Highway Patrol cars at various exits on I-680 for the closure, they could have been called to respond quickly, but he also said that it first comes down to 911 operations getting better so those calls can quickly come through in the first place.
“I don’t blame the police, I don’t blame the sheriff,” Alvarado said. “This time I blame the system.”
As for the suspects involved in the Sunol robbery and the attempted carjacking, Silacci said no arrests have been made but investigators are working on leads to positively identify the suspects.
