A 74-year-old woman is dead, struck and killed on Mission Street in SoMa, and her community will gather Monday evening at Real Guitars to remember her.
Dannielle Spillman was a familiar face at the shops along that stretch of the city, the kind of person who showed up with snacks and stayed to talk. She knew the staff by name. She knew their backstories. “Dannielle Spillman was just one of the nicest, most personable people,” Connor McKeon, an employee at Guitar Center, told reporters. “She was someone that would come in to hang out. She knew everyone’s name and she knew all of our backstories.” Friends described her as generous, devoted to music through a patchwork of jobs, and someone who opened her home to others when they needed a place to land.
She was struck near Mission and South Van Ness last week. Police arrested 30-year-old Valentino Cash Amil, who allegedly fled the scene. He now faces a murder charge with a deadly weapon enhancement and felony hit-and-run.
Prosecutors and defense attorneys gave conflicting accounts in court.
Investigators say Amil had just left a Chevron at 1601 Mission Street and was pulling onto Mission while partially blocking the sidewalk when Spillman approached the car. The two exchanged words. Spillman moved in front of the vehicle and poured liquid from a water bottle onto the hood. Authorities allege Amil then accelerated, lifting her onto the hood before she fell into the street, where he drove forward and ran over her. Defense attorney Seth Morris said Amil believed his family was in danger and was trying to leave the area, calling the collision the result of panic as he drove off with relatives in the car. Medics pronounced Spillman dead at the scene minutes later.
What the court documents don’t capture is what Spillman herself had been saying in the months before she died.
Deeply unsafe.
According to reporting by the SF Standard, Spillman had told her friend Derrick Guerra she felt increasingly unable to move through the city without confrontation. Strangers misgendered her regularly. In one incident, someone attempted to hit her at a bus stop. A pest-control worker at her apartment building repeatedly called her “sir” during a dispute over access to her unit. She told Guerra she had felt safer as a trans woman in San Francisco decades ago than she did now, a striking inversion of the story this city likes to tell about its own progress on LGBTQ inclusion.
After her death, some early coverage misgendered Spillman and incorrectly described her as homeless, and SFist documented the pushback from community members who knew her and corrected the record. That pushback matters. Misidentifying a trans woman in death, stripping her of the identity she lived, is its own kind of harm, and it compounds the grief of people already mourning.
San Francisco’s Office of Transgender Initiatives tracks data on community safety and has long documented the gap between the city’s reputation as a haven and the daily reality for many trans residents, particularly trans women of color and trans people over 60. Spillman’s account of the 1990s feeling safer is not nostalgia. It’s a data point, one that advocates have been raising for years.
The vigil takes place at Real Guitars, the SoMa shop where Spillman spent time and where staff knew her well. For San Franciscans who want to understand what the city owes its longtime residents, particularly those who’ve been here through every cycle of displacement and change, showing up Monday night is a start. Community members can also find resources for trans safety and support through national organizations if local crises feel overwhelming.
Spillman had been part of this neighborhood’s daily fabric for years. She brought treats, struck up conversations, and cared about the people around her. San Francisco’s Vision Zero program tracks every fatal collision in the city, and her name will be added to that count. But the numbers don’t hold what the people at Real Guitars knew about her.