Surveillance video posted to Reddit on Monday appears to show a SoMa hit-and-run death was intentional, with the driver of a black Mercedes accelerating directly into a pedestrian near Mission and South Van Ness.
Police arrested 30-year-old Valentino Cash Amil the same day, after a brief chase. He was booked on homicide and felony hit-and-run with injury charges. A small child was in the car when officers took him into custody.
The video is grim. SFist flagged as graphic and warned readers before posting it, and that warning’s warranted. The footage appears to come from a nearby surveillance camera and tells a specific story: the black Mercedes is straddling the sidewalk, nose-out, apparently trying to exit a driveway. The victim, who may have been homeless, moves from behind the car to the front of it. Then the driver accelerates. The man hits the hood, goes down, and gets run over.
That’s not a driver who didn’t see someone. That’s a driver who did.
Also caught on camera: a white pickup truck that may match the vehicle police described as cooperating with the investigation drives into frame and steers around the body. A Waymo vehicle appears in the background too, which could give investigators something useful. Those robotaxis run multi-camera arrays that record continuously in all directions, and San Francisco police have pulled Waymo footage before in crash investigations. If the car’s system was logging that stretch of South Van Ness at the time, the department’s Homicide unit may have a cleaner angle on what happened before impact.
“Waymo has cooperated with law enforcement in past investigations when legally required,” a company spokesperson said in 2026, describing the company’s general policy on footage requests.
Amil didn’t make it easy. After the collision, he allegedly led police on a chase before officers caught up with him. That detail, combined with what the surveillance footage appears to show, gives prosecutors a lot to work with, though the video still has to hold up through the legal process.
Then things got strange on Wednesday.
A second Reddit post surfaced showing a black Mercedes cutting hard into a bike lane while making a fast right turn at 8th and Mission, just blocks from Monday’s crash site. A local TV outlet picked it up. The date on the footage isn’t confirmed. It’s not certain whether this is the same car. A visible image of the driver in that second clip looks considerably older than 30, which doesn’t match Amil’s age, so that thread may dead-end or may point to a completely unrelated pattern of aggressive driving on that corridor.
The Outer Sunset and Bernal neighborhoods don’t see this kind of concentrated incident clustering. SoMa does. That stretch of Mission near 8th compresses pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers into a tight space, and the infrastructure doesn’t give people much margin when someone decides not to follow the rules.
For now, 2026 has already handed the city a handful of cases where video evidence showed what police reports alone couldn’t. People who live and walk and bike in this part of the city don’t need a data set to tell them the risk feels real. Another week, another surveillance clip doing the work the street wasn’t designed to do.