Did Sacramento police miss chance to detain man charged with killing two in Vacaville?

Two months before Raymond Michael Weber was arrested Saturday in connection with the slaying of two women in a Vacaville apartment, the Sacramento man was accused of a violent outburst against a woman he was dating, allegedly pistol-whipping her and firing at least one shot at her before she escaped.

But Sacramento police summoned to the scene of the incident in Oak Park on Nov. 29 took no action to detain or even question Weber, according to the woman, who asked that her name not be disclosed because she fears for her safety.

“He shot at me in the front seat and it went between my legs and it hit the floorboard, and I’m like, ‘Why are you doing this? Please stop,’” the woman said in an interview Monday with The Sacramento Bee. “He’d already beaten me really bad with the gun.”

The woman, who said she had dated Weber for a handful of times before the attack, said she escaped by running barefoot through Oak Park and hiding in a backyard for an hour before finding a resident in his front yard smoking who let her use his phone to call 911.

“I told them what had happened and the police officers, they finally came,” the woman said. “They just thought I was hallucinating, on drugs, so they didn’t believe me.”

Then, she said, she saw Weber’s car nearby, and spotted him walking nearby.

“I said, ‘There’s his car right there,’” she said. “He had my cell phone, he had my car keys, my house keys. And then I said, ‘Officers, he’s right there.’ All they did was look at the car and say, ‘There’s no bullet hole in that car.’

“I said, ‘Why don’t you stop and question him? He’s walking into that apartment there, he’s right there.’ I even told them, ‘He’s armed and dangerous, please don’t go out there by yourself.’ I didn’t want the officers to get hurt.”

Instead of confronting Weber, the officers drove her home, she said.

Sacramento police confirmed Thursday that the incident was under investigation.

“Regarding the incident that occurred on November 29, 2020, that you are speaking of, we can confirm that the Sacramento Police Department responded and conducted an investigation,” Sgt. Sabrina Briggs wrote in an email. “However, a third-party complaint that we are currently investigating, has recently been filed with our Internal Affairs Division, which prohibits us from commenting any further.”

After The Bee first published the woman’s account Friday morning, a Vallejo civil rights attorney confirmed she had filed the internal affairs complaint on the woman’s behalf.

“I filed a formal complaint on behalf of the living victim late yesterday afternoon and the Sacramento Police Department has opened an internal affairs investigation into this egregious failure,” attorney Melissa Nold wrote on Twitter in response to the story.

“Yes, it certainly appears that the Sac Police missed an opportunity to prevent a double homicide and also ignored the compulsory domestic violence laws,” she wrote in a separate tweet.

Nold said in a subsequent interview that if officers saw the woman had physical injuries they were compelled to detain Weber, adding, “a bloody victim deserves attention.”

“Something’s gone terribly wrong,” she said. “If there’s an explanation for this we want to hear it, because this poor woman is going to be impacted by this for the rest of her life, and one of those impacts is thinking that calling the police is not the answer.”

Now, with Weber facing two counts of murder in a bizarre barricade situation that reportedly included Weber livestreaming from the apartment where the bodies were, the woman says she is haunted by the notion that the women in Vacaville might be alive today if Sacramento police had acted.

“I felt so sick,” she said. “If they had arrested him then those two girls wouldn’t be dead.

“I just feel like they really failed me and those girls. If they had gotten him that night he never would have been able to do that to those girls.”

Weber is currently being held in the Solano County Jail on two counts of first-degree murder. He also is being held on previously filed charges of domestic violence and assault with a deadly weapon, police said.

Vacaville police say they were summoned to the apartment complex just after midnight Jan. 30 by a woman who called to report a man with a gun.

“She stated the man had livestreamed himself on social media from inside the apartment,” police said. “The video showed the man carrying a handgun and two women lying on the floor — not moving.”

Police said Weber remained barricaded inside the apartment for hours before the incident ended.

“Eventually, officers entered the apartment and found the man hiding inside,” police said. “After a brief struggle — during which an officer utilized a taser — the man was taken into custody at approximately 8:32 am.

“Officers additionally found two women deceased inside of the apartment. The cause of their death remains under investigation and their identities are being withheld pending next-of-kin notifications.”

This story was originally published February 5, 2021 at 10:31 AM.