Bail win for 18-year-old with gun record accused of shooting at Potrero Hill rival and possessing an assault pistol
An 18-year-old with a juvenile adjudication for firearms possession, who prosecutors say opened fire on a rival in San Francisco’s Potrero Terrace projects, and was later found with an assault weapon, has won bail again.
Davonte Pearson-Shaw is accused of being one of two shooters captured on surveillance camera footage during the December 17 2024 incident. He was known on sight to the city gun crime cops who inspected the video as they had arrested him for a robbery at the same location months earlier.
Pearson-Shaw was released last week by Superior Court Judge Vernon Kenneth Nakahara — a retired Alameda judicial officer serving as a ‘visiting judge’.
The investigation proceeded at a stately pace with the prosecution being initiated some five months after the defendant’s initial arrest and three months after DNA results linked him to a cache of firearms. He was already on juvenile probation.
An arrest warrant application detailed investigators’ belief that, on the evening of December 17 2024, a red Tesla arrived outside an apartment block on Conneticut Street. Video from Watchtower security cameras showed the front passenger get out of the car and begin to chase away a group of teenagers who had gathered in the building’s lobby. The video, say police, then shows bullets hitting the ground around him while a woman carrying a baby nearby ducks for cover.
A 911 caller at the time told dispatchers they heard 20 gunshots.
A daylight inspection of the apartment block revealed “fresh bullet hole damage” along the west side of the building. Investigators learned that the teenagers in the apartment block had been using an apartment while its resident was away over the Christmas holiday season.
Police noted that one of the shooters was wearing a distinctive pair of Gucci sneakers with reflective stripes — which, they told a judge, matched those sported by Davonte Pearson-Shaw in various recently-uploaded Instagram posts and, as a result, obtained a search warrant.
Officers recognized Pearson-Shaw having arrested him as a juvenile seven months earlier for robbery at the same location. The also followed him on social media.
Investigators executed that warrant at Pearson-Shaw’s Excelsior district residence in early January 2025. There they found an ‘assault-style’ pistol equipped with a drum magazine, a .380 Hi-Point pistol and a partially disassembled 9mm Glock 17.
Forensic DNA testing linked Pearson-Shaw to the grip, magazine and cartridges of the assault pistol and to the grip of the Glock 17. Another person present in the home, Daeshawn Shaw, was DNA linked to the Hi-Point’s .380 cartridges.
An arrest warrant was eventually sought and authorized on May 12 2025.
Seventeen days later, on May 29, Pearson-Shaw was released by Superior Court judge Vernon Kenneth Nakahara on condition that he wear an ankle monitor. Prosecutors had pressed for his detention on public safety grounds.
He will be supervised by the city’s Pretrial Diversion Project — a progressive outfit with an uneven track record of protecting public safety and which seems too-often concerned with putting violent felons back on the streets to victimize others. Earlier this year, NBC Bay Area News reported that the organization had been using money that ought to have been going to employee pension accounts to pay its bills instead.
Pearson-Shaw, who has pleaded ‘not guilty’ to five firearms offenses, will next appear on July 25 for a preliminary hearing.
The case continues.
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