Walking the Line

When Dennard and his friend were chased down and shot in 2005, the police quickly zeroed in on a suspect, Ronnie "Oohda" Allen, a 21-year-old reputed hitman who ran with the Harbor Road faction. Police reports show cops on the scene asked Dennard if Allen had tried to whack him. Dennard kept mum.

Former Bayview Station Police Capt. Rick Bruce says, "We believed he could ID Ronnie Allen. At that time Allen was good for six or seven homicides and we thought we could finally get him."

But Dennard maintains that the gunman wore a red mask, making it impossible to tell who was pulling the trigger. Besides, adds Dennard, as a general rule he doesn't speak to the cops, because "it can't help me. It's just more problems."

About a month later police detectives closed the shooting case. Allen was dead, himself the victim of gunfire, and, according to police documents, there were "no other suspects or investigative leads." But for Dennard, his troubles were just beginning.

Increasingly frustrated, police officers took to taping up black-and-white "WANTED" posters bearing Dennard's mugshot around Oakdale. "This man does not live in our community and has no right to be here," the posters stated. "If you see this man in any public housing development, phone Bayview Station immediately and provide the specific location where Daniel Dennard is trespassing."

Judkins believes the police singled out her nephew for harassment. "I think it's all foul play. They were trying to find the easiest target they could find," she says, noting that Dennard's many, many arrests didn't lead "to a single conviction."

Bruce takes a different view. "He was certainly a thorn in our side," recalls Bruce, who's since retired from the force. "I don't think at that time" — during 2004 and 2005 — "he was a key player. I think he was an up-and-coming player."

And in the eyes of the cops, this up-and-coming player was about to take center stage and be given a new label by police: Murderer.

The way the cops tell it, on Sept. 19, 2005, Dennard and an accomplice unleashed a barrage of assault rifle fire — some 30 rounds — on Arkelylius Collins, as the 20-year-old man stood on a street corner near Third Street and Kirkwood Avenue.

In an interview with the San Francisco Examiner, officer Len Broberg of the SFPD Gang Task Force said Dennard stood over Collins and taunted him as he died, saying, "I told you I'd get you." Sources within the SFPD say Collins loathed the Oakdale Mob and had a propensity for shooting up the Oakdale area. The cops think the slaying was a retaliatory hit.

Within days of the killing, police busted Dennard for the crime and an unrelated late-night carjacking at a Shell gas station on Bayshore Boulevard.

Dennard was resigned to spending the rest of his life caged, figuring, "if it's God's will for me to be in jail for the rest of my life for something I didn't do, it's just gonna have to happen."

Because he was a purported gang member and a suspect in a high-profile case, the sheriff's department placed Dennard in solitary confinement and recorded his nightly phone calls to family and friends.

In the view of private detective Steve Vender, a seasoned investigator who worked on Dennard's behalf, the young man was the victim of an overzealous prosecution built on flimsy evidence. Cellphone records, which can be used to roughly determine a person's location, place Dennard in Oakland at the time of the killing, Vender says.

That information never made it into court because the murder case crumbled in May 2006 when the prosecution's star witness, Terrell Rollins, was killed in a horrifying daylight rub-out while standing in an auto repair shop on Bayshore Boulevard. The slaying, which occurred while Dennard was in jail, effectively doomed the case, since Rollins was the only witness detectives had been able to locate. According to police, three men in ski masks blasted Rollins and another man, unleashing as many as 10 gunshots before escaping in a white Cadillac without a rear license plate. The hit made the front page of San Francisco Chronicle and the local TV news, embarrassing the district attorney's office, who'd placed Rollins in a witness protection program and were paying for him to live in a Millbrae hotel. A homesick Rollins had returned to the city for a visit unprotected, ignoring the district attorney's warnings to stay away. (No evidence linking Dennard to the Rollins murder has surfaced.) Then, in another blow for the SFPD and district attorney's office, the carjacking case against Dennard collapsed.

The victims in the carjacking, Vender argues, weren't credible, and identified Dennard from an old photo that looked nothing like he did on the night of the crime. On the stand in October 2006 one victim admitted in court that he had used marijuana and ecstasy, transcripts show. "We asked 'em did they recognize anybody in the court who did the carjacking that night. They couldn't identify Dennard — and he was sitting right there," Vender recalls.

He adds that, while the carjacking was going down, Dennard was staying with his girlfriend at the San Mateo County home of a friend, a San Francisco Unified School District administrator.