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Shareef
ALLMAN
Cupertino cement plant shooting
Classification: Murderer
Characteristics:
Confrontation
with his coworkers
Number of victims: 3
Date of murders: October
5, 2012
Date of birth: 1963
Victims profile:
Mark Muñoz, 59 / John Vallejos, 51 / Manuel Guadalupe Piñon, 48
Method of murder:
Shooting (.223-caliber
semi-automatic rifle and .40-caliber handgun)
Location: Cupertino,
Santa Clara County, California, USA
Status: Committed suicide by shooting himself the same day
On October 5, 2011, an employee
walked inside the Lehigh Hanson's Permanente Cement Plant in the
San Francisco Bay Area city of Cupertino, California during a
safety meeting, and opened fire. This shooting left three people
dead and six others injured.
Shortly thereafter, the shooter, Shareef
Allman, shot a 60-year-old woman whose car he was attempting to
carjack in a parking lot. It was initially thought that Allman was
shot to death by Santa Clara County sheriff's deputies in
Sunnyvale on October 6, but an autopsy revealed that Allman had
actually committed suicide.
Details
At 4:00 a.m., Shareef Allman attended a safety
meeting inside a trailer of Lehigh Hanson's Permanente Cement
Plant, and got into a confrontation with his coworkers. He exited
outside the trailer to his car and armed himself, and walked back
into the trailer.
Allman opened fire with a .223-caliber
semi-automatic rifle and .40-caliber handgun at his co-workers,
killing three and wounding six others. Allman trapped his
co-workers inside the trailer by placing a piece of plywood and a
rope over the door to jam shut it. At 7:00 a.m., he attempted to
carjack a 60-year-old woman five miles away at a parking lot of
Hewlett Packard's campus, and shot her in the leg. She was
hospitalized in fair condition.
Allman fled on foot in a Sunnyvale neighborhood
where he eluded police in a manhunt that lasted about one day. The
shootings caused a variety of schools, such as Lawson Middle
School, and Stratford Middle School to go into lock downs. Fremont
High School and Lynbrook High School were put into "Code Blue."
Peterson Middle School, in Sunnyvale, was put on lock down for
several hours and had to hold their students after the end of
school. At Peterson, students went into lock down before school
began and were sent to their first period classes. Later in the
day, Peterson staff had to facilitate things such as students
having lunch, students going to the bathroom, and students having
recess, as well as student evacuation at the end of the day.
Peterson students were released while Allman was still at large in
the Sunnyvale area.
On morning October 6, police confronted a man
who fit the description of Allman hiding behind a car parked in
front of a house in the Birdland neighborhood of Sunnyvale,
bordering Cupertino. Allman was asked to put his hands in the air
by officers, and raised his handgun, making a comment asking to
have himself killed. Officers responded with fire. It was
initially reported that Allman died from the police officers'
multiple gunshots, but an autopsy showed that Allman's fatality
was caused by his self-inflicted gunshot wound.
The shooter
The shooter, 47-year-old Shareef Allman, worked
as a truck driver at the quarry. Allman was an employee of Lehigh
Hanson's Permanente Cement Plant, the site of the quarry in the
hills to the west of Cupertino. He had worked at the plant for 15
years.
Allman married singer Qwen Mejia in July 1989.
She is also known as Valeri Allman. Their marriage was strained by
a series of violent incidents perpetrated by Allman against his
wife, according to court documents. Mejia obtained a restraining
order against Allman in 1992 and divorced him. Allman fathered a
daughter, Lashae Allman, who was born in 1993.
Shareef Allman resided in the Stonegate
Apartments of San Jose. He grew up in East Palo Alto, in a
troubled family plagued by domestic abuse. Friends described him
as a community activist and a happy, comedic man, and that he was
never known to be violent and would advocate against violence,
especially domestic abuse and gang activity.
Allman had been a producer for CreaTV, a San
Jose-based public access broadcasting company, where he hosted a
show entitled "Real 2 Real." In his show, Allman interviewed
famous activists and figures such as Reverend Jesse Jackson. He
had written a novel, Amazing Grace, about a fictional
victim of domestic abuse who overcame her tribulations with the
help of God. Allman had worked as a bouncer for a nightclub in
Sunnyvale and was trained in mixed martial arts.
Neighbors and acquaintances of Allman said that
he was unhappy about being treated unfairly by co-workers,
experiencing racial discrimination, and having his job being moved
to a night shift. The weekend prior to the attack, a friend said
Shareef Allman visited him in Sacramento and showed him his trunk
with an AK-47 inside and said that he had racist co-workers. The
friend said that he thought Allman was joking and did not take the
statement as a threat.
Victims
The three men killed are: Mark Muñoz, 59, of
San Jose; John Vallejos, 51, of San Jose; and Manuel Guadalupe
Piñon, 48, of Newman. Among the seven people injured were Jesse
Vallejos and Mike Ambrosio.
Wikipedia.org
Cupertino suspect died of
self-inflicted gunshot, Santa Clara County coroner finds
PeninsulaPress.com
October 6, 2011
UPDATE, Oct. 11, 3:45 p.m.: The Santa Clara
County coroner’s office has concluded that Shareef Allman died of
a self-inflicted gunshot to the temple, not from bullets fired by
county sheriff’s deputies, the San Jose Mercury News reports.
PUBLISHED OCT. 5: Cupertino shooting suspect
Shareef Allman was shot and killed Thursday morning in Sunnyvale
during a confrontation with Santa Clara County sheriff’s deputies.
The shooting happened about 7:20 a.m. outside a
home near Peacock Avenue and Lorne Way. The neighborhood is about
half a mile from the Hewlett Packard headquarters where Allman
allegedly carjacked and shot a woman Wednesday morning, the San
Jose Mercury News reports, citing multiple law enforcement
agencies.
The San Francisco Chronicle reports that Santa
Clara County Sheriff Laurie Smith said three deputies spotted
Allman, holding a handgun and crouching behind a car in the
driveway of the home. ”The deputies identified him as the
suspect,” the Chronicle quoted Smith as saying. “He did display,
in a threatening manner, a firearm. We don’t have any more
information on that, and all three deputies did fire on the
suspect.”
Hundreds of federal and local officers had been
searching for Allman, 47, of San Jose, for more than 24 hours.
Before the carjacking, sheriff’s officials say,
Allman shot nine people at Lehigh Southwest Cement Permanente
Plant, where he worked as a truck driver and was a union leader.
Two died at the scene and a third died at a local hospital.
Wednesday afternoon, authorities — including a
SWAT team, hundreds of officers from neighboring police
departments, the FBI and the U.S. Marshal’s Service — cordoned off
the Sunnyvale neighborhood where Allman’s car was found abandoned
in a restaurant parking lot. Officers searched home-to-home while
helicopters hovered, but they were unable to locate the suspect
until Thursday morning.
Authorities recovered a handgun, a shotgun and
two assault rifles from various locations Wednesday but believed
Allman was still armed, Sheriff Smith told the Chronicle, citing
surveillance video.
An HP employee, Enrico Balanuuit, who witnessed
the attempted hijacking, told KQED’s Stephanie Martin that he was
returning to the parking lot to get his laptop Wednesday morning
when he saw a large man trying to talk to a female co-worker. “I
noticed he chased her. I think he was trying to get something. He
grabbed her and then he punched her. Then after he punched her, I
tried to hide, was trying to get in the car and go help (the
victim), but then when I was hiding, I heard two shots.” Balanuuit
said. He said the woman’s nose was broken and she was shot in the
“lower right side of her body.”
The motive for the shooting is not yet known.
But a neighbor told the Chronicle that Allman had recently been
moved to the quarry’s night shift, and “was not happy about it.”
The neighbor, Paulette Conner, said he has a 20-year-old son and
an 18-year-old daughter, who she said was under police guard
Wednesday afternoon at Allman’s apartment on Renaissance Drive in
San Jose.
“She was frantic,” Conner said. “It’s horrible
for her. He’s the only parent she knows. She’s a good kid, and I
feel bad for her.”
A union representative, Mike Weltz, told The
Bay Citizen that Allman had just returned from a four-week
vacation and had been with the company for about 15 years. KGO
Radio quoted co-workers describing Allman as a “lively, likeable
guy” who became unusually sullen and silent on Tuesday. A group of
Allman’s friends made public pleas for him to surrender to
authorities.
The woman shot in the attempted carjacking and
two male victims from the quarry were taken to Santa Clara Valley
Medical Center, said hospital spokesperson Joy Alexiou. One man
was treated and released, and the other man and woman are in fair
condition, meaning their vital signs are stable. “The patients are
conscious. And indicators are favorable, ” Alexiou said.
Another victim was taken to the emergency room
at Stanford University Medical Center in Palo Alto, spokesperson
Gary Migdol confirmed. Migdol said the hospital would not release
further details. A spokeswoman for Regional Medical Center in San
Jose said two of the shooting victims were brought to the
hospital. One was treated and released, and the spokeswoman would
not release information on the other.
Carmen Rodriguez told the San Jose Mercury News
that her brother-in-law, Mark Munoz, died in the shooting. “He was
very loving, very caring, and he couldn’t wait to retire,” she
said of Munoz, who was in his 50s and had worked at Lehigh for 20
years.
Allman produced a television show, “Real 2
Real,” which San Jose’s CreaTV broadcast. According to The Bay
Citizen, Allman had recently interviewed the Rev. Jesse Jackson,
among other politicians and celebrities, for the show, and had
self-published “Amazing Grace,” a novel about female victims of
domestic violence. YouTube videos from “Real 2 Real” were removed
from the site this morning.
Peninsula Press staff writers Kathryn Roethel,
Jessica Parks, Eric Johnson, Emily DeRuy, Liu (Laura) He and Joyce
Ho contributed to this report.
Court documents paint
picture of shooting suspect
By Dan Noyes - ABClocal.go.com
October 6, 2011
SAN JOSE, Calif. (KGO) -- The image of Shareef Allman that
many saw for the first time -- interviews conducted on public
access television -- showed a man who promoted peace, but court
documents paint a much different picture.
Allman had claimed a book he wrote on domestic
violence was the most popular book in six women's prisons, but in
several court records uncovered by ABC7, Allman was shown to have
faced some serious accusations himself.
Allman left behind two adult children by two
different women: Valerie Allman was one of them, married to Allman
for three years before she filed for divorce and a restraining
order in Santa Clara County Superior Court.
"My husband has a violent temper," she wrote.
"Cannot stand anyone to disagree with him. He interprets it as a
challenge to him, and he reacts with physical violence."
She later went on to say that Allman "assaulted
me several times during the marriage...grabbed me by my hair and
dragged me off the bed."
Valerie Allman said the most serious incident
required a police visit and medical treatment in August 1991.
"He picked up a brass lamp and hit me on the
side of the head and knocked me unconscious," Valerie Allman
wrote.
One time, she said Allman flew into a rage when
he couldn't find one of his guns.
"He started accusing me...I did not take his
gun, but he would not believe me," Valerie Allman wrote.
In court papers, Allman accused his former wife
of being jealous "because I have found a new relationship and she
still wants to be married."
"My wife should note that I am very physically
fit, and being physically fit I know that I have to take care and
not to exert what I may think would be normal pressure which other
people may believe to be physical abuse," Allman wrote. "However,
in this case, I can clearly say this physical abuse never
occurred."
In the end, the judge gave Valerie Allman sole
custody of their son and allowed Allman to visit. Valerie Allman's
claims echo those that were heard on Wednesday from the mother of
Allman's other child.
Cupertino shooting: Friends of Shareef
Allman react to his death
Los Angeles Times
October 6, 2011
Friends of Shareef Allman, the
suspect in the fatal workplace shootings in Cupertino, reacted
with sorrow and regret Thursday that another life had been lost --
and that the man they knew as a pillar of the African American
community and a kind-hearted mediator of conflict will never be
able to explain his actions.
While
law-enforcement officials have not yet made a positive
identification, a man matching the description of Allman was shot
and killed by Santa Clara County sheriff's deputies on a
residential driveway early Thursday, in the heart of the
neighborhood where an intensive manhunt had taken place after
Wednesday’s shootings.
Shortly after hearing the
news, Rev. Jethroe "Jeff" Moore II, the head of the Silicon Valley
NAACP, and longtime community activist Walter Wilson jumped into a
car to seek out Allman's 17-year-old daughter, known to all
Allman's friends, Moore said, as "the love of his life."
"We are devastated by the loss of life," Moore said of the
addition of the 47-year-old Allman to the tally of three killed at
his alleged hands at Lehigh Southwest Cement's Permanente plant on
Wednesday. "They just closed the book and we’ll never know what
page was ripped from it.... For my own selfish reasons I wish he
had been taken alive so we could at least have had some
conversation or explanation."
Moore expressed
condolences to the "three other families who have been devastated
by this. To get up to go to work and never come back, it’s a
shock," he said. "As a community, we are hurt and at a loss for
the proper words."
Yet the overwhelming emotion
by those who knew Allman was one of stunned confusion. Moore, who
met Allman years ago before each turned to Christianity, said his
strapping friend was always well-dressed and well-spoken. "He was
a ladies man and I thought I was too," he said with a laugh about
their early shenanigans.
But the days of
club-hopping turned to more serious pursuits. In his cable-access
show, in the book he self-published, and in the daily life he led,
Allman pressed other African American men to be strong, honest
leaders, Moore and Wilson said. He raised his daughter from
infancy by himself. Her face was on the cover of his book,
"Amazing Grace," which detailed his own troubled childhood and
spoke out against domestic violence. He also helped raise a son,
now 20, who has a different mother.
He came out of a family where there was some
abuse between the mother and father, and he always talked about
how he survived and made it out of that and he would never have
that in his daughter’s life," Moore said. "He talked about how as
black men we need to take responsibility for our families and
raise them -- be dads, be strong dads -- a point he always drove
home in his messages."
Now, his daughter is
fatherless, an outcome Moore and Wilson called "mind boggling."
What baffles them most is that the Allman they knew had the skills
to resolve conflicts -- and often did. He was the one who would
intercede when emotions ran high among others to say, "How can we
work this out? Let’s come to the table. We can come to an
understanding that is satisfactory," Moore said. "I never even
heard him raise his voice."
Those notions of
Allman are now upside-down. According to a San Jose Mercury News
interview with one of the men injured in the shootings, Allman
clocked in at 4 a.m., poured a cup of coffee, then pulled a gun
from his jacket and opened fire. Three men would die there and six
would be injured. Allman is believed to have shot a woman in the
arm a few hours later in a failed carjacking attempt, bringing the
toll of injured to seven.
Wilson said that
Allman had shared problems he was having at the cement plant,
where he was employed for 15 years.
"He talked
about his job in the past, on several occasions, that people were
trying to do things to undermine him," said Wilson, who met Allman
nearly a quarter-century ago. "He did feel that there were some
people there who were doing systemic discriminatory practices."
But, Wilson said, "in general the issues that he had there, it
seemed to me like he had it under control.... He did have options.
That’s what boggles the mind."
Wilson, Moore and
another local pastor Wednesday set up at a church near the command
post and told law-enforcement officials "that if they spotted him
to bring us out so we could talk him down."
They
never got that chance.
Shareef Allman: from God to guns
By Kevin Fagan - SFGate.com
October 5, 2011
CUPERTINO -- Shareef Allman struggled for years with the pain of a
tough upbringing, fractured family ties and inner demons, and his
friends believed he had conquered that pain with his love for his
children and for God.
Now they don't know what
to believe.
The 49-year-old man they know as a
peacemaker and churchgoing father shot up the quarry where he
works Wednesday, killing three colleagues and wounding six, then
shot and wounded a woman whose car he was trying to steal, police
said. Until the news bulletins began blaring, many of his friends
didn't even know he knew how to fire a gun.
And
those who did never thought anything of it.
Never a fighter
Mitchell Julien, 50, of San
Lorenzo, who has known Allman for 20 years, said he knew his
friend had a .40-caliber handgun and shot it at ranges - but he
described Allman as a "big teddy bear."
"If you met him, you'd love him," Julien said.
"This guy is not a monster."
Longtime friend
Pastor Jeff Moore, president of the NAACP San Jose/Silicon Valley
branch, said that if Allman has an emotionally explosive streak,
he's never seen it.
"When we were young, I was
at parties with Shareef and we would go to clubs, but even in
those days he was never violent," Moore said. "I've seen him break
up fights - I have never seen him fight.
"Everything he does is to create a positive impression of black
men."
Clues to the turmoil that Allman fought to
overcome, however, could be found in his writings.
"I've struggled from childhood, to man, to be the best that I am,"
he wrote in the foreword to "Amazing Grace," his 2007
self-published novel decrying domestic violence. "I had a very
disheartened childhood. I felt unloved and hurt, and that hurt
feeling turned into hate. Hate for the drugs that my mother used
and hate for my father for the women he used and abused."
He turned himself around, he wrote, with dedication to
Christianity, saying, "Life for me today is a different tale."
'Ladies man'
Growing up in East Palo
Alto, Allman was - and still is - a handsome, well-muscled man. He
was "a bit of a ladies man before he became the family man that he
is today," Moore said.
Twenty years ago he had a
son, Shareef Kawaan Allman, by one woman, and then two years later
he had his daughter, LaShae Allman, with another. Both
relationships broke up, and Allman collected a criminal history
that includes five convictions for driving on a suspended or
revoked license, and misdemeanor convictions for possession of
stolen property and disturbing the peace, authorities said.
Devotion to his children was apparent to all
who knew him, friends said - and that might have had something to
do with what happened Wednesday.
A neighbor at the apartment complex on
Renaissance Drive in San Jose where Allman lives, Paulette Conner,
said Allman had recently been moved to the 10 p.m.-to-6 a.m. shift
at the quarry and "was not happy about it," because it left him
less time with his daughter.
"My kids, I know,
are a gift from above," Allman wrote in his book.
Religious involvement
For more than a
decade, Allman has attended a cluster of churches in San Jose,
singing in choirs, writing religious holiday plays and helping
teach the gospel to youths, friends said. He produces and hosts
"Real 2 Real," a religious talk show on San Jose's public access
CreaTV, and has interviewed gospel singers and celebrities,
including Damon Wayans, Jesse Jackson and Mr. T.
When trouble arises, Allman has often been the one to mediate, not
escalate, his friends said.
"He's cool," said
Albert Salazar, a neighbor of Allman's. "He doesn't mess with
anybody. He loves God, and he was always helping kids stay out of
gangs.
"He and I both come from pretty hard
backgrounds, and kids can tell that and respect that."
When he first began raising his daughter, he was on welfare,
Allman wrote in his book. However, since then he has worked as a
model and a salesman, and he'd logged 15 years at the quarry where
he worked until Wednesday as a truck driver.
Pastor Tony Williams of Maranatha Christian
Center said he and Allman were close because they had both spent
time behind bars and felt they had learned from the experience.
"He is a helper," Williams said. "I will have
to ask him what went so terribly wrong."
Chronicle staff writer Jaxon Van Derbeken contributed to this
report.
