Danielle Spillman
Age 7413 Apr 2026
San Francisco, California (USA)
Run over
Danielle was a guitarist known for her big heart and community spirit. She died after being deliberately run over.
Valentino Cash Amil, 30, was arrested.
Those who knew her say Dannielle Spillman had a generous spirit and a gentle soul, with a musical talent that shone brightest when she had a guitar in her hands.
Spillman, 74, died Monday after she was struck by a black Mercedes outside the Tower Car Wash in SoMa, in an incident caught on grisly surveillance footage. Valentino Cash Amil, 30, has been charged with murder and is in custody after a judge denied his request for bail.
“She had one of the biggest, most compassionate hearts I’ve ever encountered,” said Derrick Guerra, a caregiver for the Shanti Project, an LGBTQ+ support organization. Guerra met weekly with Spillman — who was trans — in her 15th Street studio apartment. She’d often have a pot of mint tea ready when he arrived.
Guerra said her compassion was reflected in the water bottles she carried to give to homeless people, or the time a pigeon flew into her apartment and she nursed it back to health. A few days before her death, Spillman gave him a CD of a 1973 live Grateful Dead concert.
Music was her great passion, friends said. Her apartment was filled with guitars, a banjo, and a ukulele. She was a fixture at the Real Guitars shop, a block from the site of the crash, where she would play guitars and talk music history with the staff and customers several days a week. She wasn’t an employee but organized a holiday party for the staff, complete with pizza.
Ben Levin, who has owned Real Guitars for nearly 30 years, knew Spillman for about half that time. “She’d end up at our store late in the afternoon, maybe three or four times a week, and she’d always hang,” he said. “She would talk to the customers who’d come in. She loved guitar. She loved music. She was just a great person to have around.”
A right-handed guitarist who played in an open tuning she invented herself, Spillman had roots in the late 1960s California commune scene. She told Levin she came of age musically as a teenager living in Norway, where her father was stationed in the Air Force, and was handed a copy of Country Joe & the Fish’s debut album by a serviceman. “It blew her mind,” Levin said. “She had no idea this whole idea was out there — that you could be that person, that you could say these things, think these thoughts. It was 1967.”
https://www.advocate.com/news/crime/dannielle-spillman-killed-san-francisco
https://www.them.us/story/dannielle-spillman-san-francisco-trans-woman-run-over-killed
https://sfist.com/2026/04/20/vigil-to-be-held-monday-for-pedestrian-killed-in-soma-hit-and-run/
https://sfstandard.com/2026/04/17/dannielle-spillman-hit-and-run-sf/
https://www.ktvu.com/news/soma-fatal-hit-run-valentino-amil-charged
https://sfstandard.com/2026/04/14/san-francisco-fatal-hit-and-run-soma/
https://www.ktvu.com/news/pedestrian-killed-san-francisco-hit-and-run-collision
