Couple get prison for assaulting photog at Presidio
A couple was sentenced to federal prison for assaulting and robbing a photographer they spotted at the Palace of Fine Arts.
(KTVU) - Here's KTVU crime reporter Henry Lee's Rap Sheet blog for Sept. 22, 2016:
PRISON IN PHOTOG ASSAULT: A couple have been sentenced to federal prison for robbing and attacking a professional photographer in San Francisco's Presidio.
Tiffany Smith was sentenced today to six years behind bars. Her boyfriend Daron McClinton was ordered last week to spend six years and three months in prison.
On Oct. 3, the two were at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco when they spotted the photographer, identified in court records only as T.Q., at a photo shoot.
They followed him in their car to a second photo shoot at the Presidio and watched as T.Q. unloaded camera equipment from his parked car.
Smith, a mother of three, got out of her car, pointed a pistol at T.Q. and demanded his property. When T.Q. did not comply, McClinton got out of the car with his own pistol.
Both then pistol-whipped T.Q. "repeatedly about his head and neck until T.Q. relinquished his property," authorities said. Then they fled. A witness called police with their license plate. San Francisco police spotted the car and briefly chased it, but they escaped.
Investigators later tied the couple to the case by tracing the car to McClinton's mother and finding surveillance video showing the couple in the car hours before the robbery.
T.Q. suffered deep lacerations to his head. The stolen gear was worth $9,696, according to federal prosecutors.
The couple accosted the victim out of a misguided attempt to "gain some cash to help ends meet" with the "holidays looming and their financial situation precarious," McClinton's attorney, Chief Assistant Federal Public Defender Geoffrey Hansen wrote in a sentencing memo.
Hansen wrote that his client never intended to assault the victim but instead, "unfortunately reacted to protect Ms. Smith when she encountered resistance during the course of the robbery."
Smith admitted to getting nigh in the Presidio before the incident, according to her attorney's sentencing memo.
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