Judge Orders Pizza Family Daughter to Stand Trial in Knife-Showing Case

A La Mesa officer nearly shot Delina Sanfilippo when the pizza family member displayed a knife a few feet away from the face of a police colleague June 7, the officer said Tuesday morning in El Cajon Superior Court.

Officer Misty Rothrock, testifying in Sanfilippo’s preliminary hearing, said: “I thought for a second about shooting her.” But since Officer Matthew Gay might have been in the line of fire, Rothrock instead rushed Sanfilippo from behind.

“I decided to push her down, so she could not assault [Gay],” she said minutes before Judge John Thompson ordered Sanfilippo to stand trial on charges of assault on a peace officer—a felony that could net five years in prison. 

Her arraignment was set for 1:25 p.m. Aug. 9. Sanfilippo, 41, is free on $50,000 bail.

Gay also testified at the hearing, saying he ordered Sanfilippo, daughter of Sanfilippo’s Pizza owner Anna Sanfilippo, to drop the knife to no avail.

“It’s legal, see?” Sanfilippo allegedly said of the folding knife she pulled from a pocket and opened three to five feet away from Gay, he told the court. “She kept saying it’s legal.”

Gay said that once he saw the knife and that she was reaching for it, “I put my hand on my gun and took a step back.”

After handcuffing Sanfilippo, Gay said she told him: “Why are you arresting me? You can’t do this to me. Do you know who I am? You need to call my mom.”

Also testifying was Tyler Robert King, 18, who said he was a passenger in the car Sanfilippo was driving before 11 a.m. in the 7600 block of Alvarado Road in front of Bob Stall Chevrolet.  Her car had hit another, which brought police and paramedics to the scene.

King, with thick black hair drooping in front of his eyes, disputed having said “I knew something like this would happen the way she was driving” as alleged by deputy district attorney Shanish Aloor.

Sanfilippo, the head of the wait staff at Sanfilippo's Pizza, did not testify at the hearing but sat quietly next to her defense attorney, Michael London, a late 1960s linebacker with the San Diego Chargers.

London challenged Gay’s account of his actions, citing surveillance videotape shot by the Bob Stall dealership. 

London crowded around a laptop with Aloor and Sanfilippo, watching a 10-second clip of the moment of contact between Gay and Sanfilippo, but the courtroom audience of six—including pizza restaurant founder Anna Sanfilippo—couldn’t see it.

Gay, a 10-year officer who took the stand for 37 minutes, began testimony by describing Sanfilippo as being “very agitated, animated, very hyper” after he encountered her following the traffic accident. Her car had hit another vehicle in a driveway, he testified.

“She wouldn’t sit still,” Gay said. “Wouldn’t answer my questions.”

Eventually, he calmed her down, he said, and “she gave me information.”

When paramedics arrived, Gay said, she at first declined treatment but later said she wanted to see medics about a burn on her arm.

Then she got “animated” again, Gay said, and told authorities not to “disrespect her.” She began yelling and screaming, he said, saying: “Don’t you know who I am?”

When an Automobile Club tow truck arrived to take her car, however, she refused to deal with Gay, saying she would talk only to the female officer—Rothrock.

But Gay noticed something silver in her waistband—and Rothrock, a nine-year police veteran—saw the handle of a folding knife, she said during her 22 minutes on the witness stand.

“Was that really a knife?” Rothrock recalls thinking. “I told [Gay] as discreetly as I could: ‘You know, she has a knife.’ ”

Sanfilippo overheard the exchange, Gay testified.

"You want my knife?" Gay quoted Sanfilippo as saying.

"I said: Don't touch that knife," Gay told the court. "She said: ‘It's legal. It's legal.’ She opened it toward me in an agitated state."

Rothrock testified: “I believed [the knife] was less than two feet from his face,” she said. “I needed to be the one to act, instead of talk.”

After deciding not to fire her gun, Rothrock rushed the knife-wielder from behind. Sanfilippo fell face-first into the ground and was handcuffed, the court was told.

Sanfilippo’s backpack later revealed a smoking pipe with evidence it had been used for marijuana, Rothrock testified. The anti-anxiety medicine Xanax also was found.

Taken to the La Mesa Police Station, Sanfilippo was “very adamant that she didn’t want to go to Las Colinas,” the women’s jail in Santee, Rothrock said. 

Asked to give up her jewelry, Sanfilippo “gritted her teeth and said: ‘I’d like to see you try,’ ” the officer said. She later handed over her items to family members, Rothrock said.

In a final appeal to Judge Thompson, defense attorney London asked whether a crime had occurred, saying: “This is not a classic [case of] assault with a deadly weapon. There was no injury.”

London called the incident “an unfortunate misunderstanding” and asked instead that the case be judged a “wobbler”—one that could be judged a felony or misdemeanor based on intent and circumstances—and that Sanfilippo be subject only to misdemeanor penalties.

Seconds later, around 11:30 a.m., Thompson said: “I find sufficient cause” to order a trial on two felony counts of assault.

Updated at 11:25 a.m. July 27, 2011.