Medical authorities say two people were killed last night in an apparent shooting in the city's Bayview District.
According to the Coroner's Office, the victims were identified as 39-year-old Allen Vance and 20-year-old Chastity Dollison, both of San Francisco.
Police were called to the intersection of Silver Avenue and Elmira Street around 10:30 p.m., where they found the victims, one dead, one in critical condition, and a third with non life-threatening injuries.
Chastity Dollison, 20, was shot dead, along with her father, Allen Vance, 39, as they sat in her car in San Francisco's Silver Terrace neighborhood.
Brunette Dollison Vance, 43, Dollison's mother, wept as she recalled learning after her daughter's June 13, 2012 death that she'd planned to get her GED diploma that month.
"She had all these plans," Vance, who now lives in Greenwood, Mississippi, said in a recent phone interview about the deaths of her husband and her daughter, who was a lesbian. "She wanted to do so many things. Everything was just snatched away in one night."
Police are still looking for whoever's responsible for the killings, and they're seeking the public's help.
Citing police, the report from the medical examiner's office says that officers who responded to the scene, at Elmira Street and Silver Avenue, that Wednesday night "found a man in the street with an apparent leg wound" pointing to Dollison's Lexus.
She was sitting in the driver's seat with gunshot wounds to her head, shoulder, and back, and her father, who'd been shot in the head, was sitting in the front passenger seat.
Dollison was pronounced dead at the scene at 10:33 p.m. Vance died at San Francisco General Hospital at 2:07 a.m. the next day.
San Francisco police homicide Inspector Daniel Cunningham said in an interview that the man who'd been in the street when police arrived had been in the backseat of the car and ducked when the shooting started. The man was the boyfriend of a cousin of Dollison's.
Dollison and the others "ran out of gas," Cunningham said, and "a short time later, the unknown suspect or suspects" approached the car and fired multiple shots.
The surviving passenger "did not get a good look at the suspects," Cunningham said. The man reported that he hadn't seen or heard any vehicles prior to the shooting, and the suspects fled on foot. A gun hasn't been recovered.
Cunningham said the surviving passenger is the only witness he knows of. Despite police canvassing the neighborhood and distributing fliers, and the shooting happening across the street from a usually busy soccer field, he said, nobody has come forward to say they'd seen the shooting, although some have reported hearing the shots. There were no surveillance cameras in the area at the time of the killings.
Among possible motives, Cunningham said one was that there had been "a love triangle."
A woman had been "trying to fight" with Dollison "over some girl," he said. He knows who the other women are, but he didn't share their names.
One of the women is a person of interest, said Cunningham.
The main challenge in the case is the motive may "not have anything to do with Chastity at all."
He said that among other possible reasons for the killings, her father, who'd spent years in prison, may have been the person the shooters had sought.
Vance said she doesn't know why someone would kill her family members.
"I know Chastity, she had had a couple of altercations with a couple of girls," but she didn't know what the fights had been about.
"Everybody liked Chastity," Vance said. "They wouldn't do anything that bad to her to want to kill her."
Cunningham said he recently put in a request for evidence, including DNA, to be tested, and he's also hoping to re-interview the surviving passenger.
Besides taking GED classes at the time she was killed, Dollison had also been working at San Francisco Conservation Corps and at a halfway house in the Excelsior neighborhood.
Someone familiar with the case said Dollison was a lesbian, but Vance said she didn't know how her daughter identified, saying she was "a private person." Others who knew Dollison didn't respond to interview requests.
"She was not a mean person at all," Vance said of her daughter. She was "a caring person. I don't know why someone would want to just take her out, unless jealousy or something kicked in."
Vance, who lived with Dollison and other family members not far from where her daughter was killed when the incident happened, said Dollison had called that night for a ride. Her father and another man, the boyfriend of a relative, went to pick her up in her car. On the way back, they ran out of gas and were waiting for another family member to bring them some fuel when they were shot, Vance said.
One thing that's "curious" to Vance is how quiet the neighborhood had been that night.
People were "always playing sports and other things," she said, but "this particular night, it was nothing. There was nobody out or anything. Nobody knew anything. That was kind of weird to me."
Cunningham asks that anyone with information related to the case, even if it seems small, contact him at [email protected].
