Max Wade, a local teen accused of attempting to shoot two people in Mill Valley and stealing celebrity chef Guy Fieri’s yellow Lamborghini, will go to trial on six of nine charges presented by the prosecution, a Marin judge ruled Monday.
The 18-year-old defendant faces two counts of attempted murder as well as shooting into an occupied pickup truck, commercial burglary and taking a vehicle without the owner’s consent. Judge Kelly Simmons declined to rule on charges that Wade tried to pull a stolen gun on detectives during his arrest in Richmond.
Wade is accused of driving up on a motorcycle and shooting at a teen couple as they sat in a Dodge pickup truck on April 13. The incident occurred in outside a home on Evergreen and Ethel avenues in Mill Valley. The motorcyclist was dressed in black with his face shielded by a black helmet with a dark-tinted visor.
“There’s nothing but circumstantial evidence to suggest my client was on that motorcycle,” defense attorney Charles Dresow said before the judge’s ruling.
The victims of the shooting, Landon Wahlstrom, 19, and Eva Dedier, 18, were the first witnesses to testify in the three-day long preliminary hearing. Investigators had previously indicated that Dedier had rebuffed Wade's romantic advances and that his problem with Wahlstrom, her boyfriend, began on Facebook. Wade supplied Dedier with fake IDs, according to her testimony.
Wade’s commercial burglary charge came from the alleged theft of Fieri's $200,000 bright yellow 2008 Lamborghini Spyder Gallardo on March 8, 2011. In the heist the thief rappelled down from the roof of British Motor Car Distributors dealership on Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco, entered through a window, then drove away in the car, according to San Francisco police.
Detectives found the Lamborghini in the Richmond storage unit near where they arrested Wade on April 29. Along with the car, they also discovered fake ID cards for California, Florida and New York, local police scanner coordinates, cellphone-jamming equipment, a dismantled AKA-47 assault weapon, a shotgun and a full San Francisco Police Department uniform with a badge and duty belt.
Investigators trailed Wade after he texted Dedier three days after the shooting about whether she wanted to pick up her fake ID, asking her if she wanted him to pick her up in the Lamborghini.
Wade, who plead not guilty to the charges in June, could face up to 30 years in prison if convicted.
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