Wife of SoMa Hit-and-Run Suspect Defends Her Husband

Dannielle Spillman was 74 years old, a trans musician and longtime San Francisco resident, when a vehicle ran her over outside a Chevron station at Mission and South Van Ness on April 13. She died from her injuries. Now the man charged with her murder has a wife speaking on his behalf, and the case is pulling in directions that don’t let anyone look away clean.

Valentino Amil, 31, faces a murder charge. Surveillance footage from the gas station shows his Mercedes blocking the sidewalk as he pulled out. Spillman walked around the front of the vehicle after the two exchanged words. She poured water from a bottle onto the hood. Amil then accelerated into her. She was knocked onto the hood, then thrown into the street, then run over. Amil didn’t stop. He left.

His defense team’s argument is that he feared for his family and was trying to escape a threat. His wife, his 11-year-old daughter, and his five-month-old son were in the car. SFist covered this detail alongside comments the wife made publicly this week. But Amil’s decision to flee the scene without speaking to police has complicated that argument considerably, and District Attorney Brooke Jenkins isn’t buying the self-defense framing.

“Having viewed the video, there is not evidence to support an argument of self-defense in this case,” Jenkins said.

Amil’s wife, who didn’t give her full name when she spoke to KTVU, called the murder charge “outrageous.” She pushed back hard on how her husband’s being characterized. “It’s not fair that the villain that they’re painting of my husband,” she said. “My husband is not a villain.”

She also said her family understands the weight of what happened. “We carry, very very deep remorse for Dannielle,” she told KTVU. “It was a life. We understand that in its entirety.”

That’s not nothing. Children’s lives get disrupted when a parent faces a murder charge, and that disruption is real. But Spillman’s death doesn’t shrink because another family is also in pain.

Spillman was known at Real Guitars and Guitar Center, two San Francisco shops where she was a regular presence as a musician. Nonprofit case worker Derrick Guerra, who knew her personally, told reporters she’d been saying for months that she felt unsafe as a trans person in the city. He said she was frequently misgendered and had started describing San Francisco as more threatening than it was when she first lived here in the 1990s. She’d watched this city transform across decades. Somewhere along the way, she stopped feeling like it was watching out for her.

Water poured on a hood and a walk around a blocked sidewalk: that’s the sum of what Spillman did. The California Penal Code’s standards for homicide don’t recognize either as justification for deadly force. The San Francisco District Attorney’s office has reviewed the surveillance footage and reached the same conclusion. According to the National Center for Transgender Equality, trans people face disproportionate exposure to street violence, and trans elders specifically are among the most vulnerable. Spillman’s own words, as relayed by Guerra, tracked that pattern exactly.

The charge is murder under California Penal Code 187. Amil was 31 in 2026 when he was charged. Spillman was 74 when she died. The surveillance camera didn’t editorialize. It just recorded what happened in the 24 seconds that changed everything.