OAKLAND — Federal prosecutors here have filed ammunition possession charges against a man who was suspected of firing a gun in the March 7 mass shooting at an after-hours nightclub, but who avoided murder charges, prosecutors announced Thursday.
Jarvis Toussaint, 38, was charged in federal court with being a felon in possession of ammunition, a crime that carries up to 15 years in prison. Toussaint also faces allegations that he punched and choked his girlfriend in his Mountain House residence, screaming, “I’m going to kill you,” court records show.
Toussaint was identified by Oakland police as one of two gunmen who fired shots inside the EZ Lounge in Oakland, at around 3 a.m. The March 7 shooting left two dead and five wounded, and Toussaint was suspected of killing the other suspected gunman, 25-year-old Markise Martin, who allegedly fired his gun after Toussaint shot him more than once.
But prosecutors declined to charge Toussaint, determining they couldn’t disprove the shooting was in self-defense or that Martin didn’t threaten Toussaint during a heated confrontation before the shooting. A spokesman for Alameda County District Attorney Ursula Jones Dickson declined to comment on the decision, saying it could be revisiting if new evidence comes up.
One of the bullets fired by Martin struck and killed 33-year-old Latetia “Teesh” Bobo, an innocent bystander who was at the club after attending a nearby First Fridays event the prior evening, authorities said.
But federal prosecutors say nothing was stopping them from charging Toussaint with illegally possessing ammunition. He isn’t supposed to have guns or ammunition because of an extensive criminal history, which includes a federal robbery case involving a plot to steal $1 million from a suspected cartel safe house, as well as a prior gun case.
But in both of those cases, Toussaint’s attorneys argued everything wasn’t as bad as prosecutors made them seem. In the 2013 robbery case, “a successful, widely-respected Oakland drug dealer” who was working as an ATF informant introduced Toussaint to an undercover federal agent who concocted a story about the cartel safe house out of thin air, a defense sentencing memo says. His 2021 gun conviction also had extenuating circumstances, his attorney argued.
“Mr. Toussaint’s very crime in this case (possession of a firearm) was committed because he took the gun from a young man because he (Mr. Toussaint) was worried the young man was going to shoot someone,” a defense sentencing memo says.
Toussaint became a youth mentor after his 2013 conviction, and in 2021 was splitting his time between “mentoring teens and young men at Fremont High School and the Boys and Girls Club in Oakland,” and shipping beer around as a driver for Anheuser-Busch, the memo says.
Toussaint is in federal custody and set to appear before a magistrate judge on May 19, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors have filed other charges against people during the course of the investigation, for unrelated alleged crimes. A 33-year-old Stockton man was charged with gun possession after police identified him as a person with a weapon at Martin’s funeral in Hayward, court records show. One of the surviving victims was also charged with violating probation in a sexual assault case, after police identified him as a person in a rap music video who produced a pistol, though the man claimed the “weapon” was actually a toy prop.