An East Palo Alto man pleaded not guilty to charges of criminal threats Tuesday after allegedly threatening to shoot relatives of his neighbor following an argument, according to the San Mateo County District Attorney’s Office.
Larry Darnell Hill, 51, was also in possession of multiple guns despite having five prior felony convictions from between 1992 and 2000 that prohibit him from owning firearms or ammunition, prosecutors said.
“It created enormous fear on (the victims’) part, which is a requirement for the statute — that the victim has true fear,” said San Mateo County District Attorney Stephen M. Wagstaffe. “In other words, you can’t think it’s just (nonsense) language, you have to fear that it’s going to happen. And both of them reported to the police that it did. That’s serious, and we just can’t allow that to occur.”
Around 5:45 p.m. Sept. 5, Hill allegedly rode his bike up next to the reporting party’s nephew and their spouse, prosecutors said. There had been neighbor problems while Hill lived next door to the reporting party. Hill believed that his neighbor was spying on him when he went into his backyard, Wagstaffe said.
Following an argument with the pair, Hill pulled out a handgun and racked it while threatening to shoot the victims, prosecutors said.
Hill told each of the two victims, “I’m gonna pop your (expletive).”
“It arose out of — (which is) so often the case — a neighborhood dispute, but his dispute was with the neighbor, the uncle to the young man who was threatened,” Wagstaffe said. “The two victims — young man, young woman — they did nothing to warrant this anger. It’s just sort of unbridled anger, and so to that extent it was of great concern.”
Prosecutors added that the incident was caught on video.
Police received a search warrant and found an AR-15 rifle, ammunition, a loaded handgun, a police scanner and five cell phones in a shed behind the house where Hill lived with his mother, prosecutors said. The ammunition included a 200-round double drum magazine of 5.56 ammunition. They also found a grocery bag of 474 grams of powder cocaine and 61 grams crack cocaine.
Wagstaffe added that Hill’s possession of an automatic rifle was also “very serious,” and that the amount of ammunition he had built up was “enormous.”
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“We don’t want automatic weapons in anybody’s hands,” he added. “That’s always scary when somebody’s loaded up ammunition like that.”
Hill was charged with two counts of criminal threats, as well as several charges for the use of a firearm in a felony, the possession of firearms and ammunition and the possession of cocaine, prosecutors said.
Hill remains in custody with bail set at $200,000. He will next appear in court Sept. 22 for a preliminary hearing.