Oakland: Man gets 11 years for killing wife’s ex in case with new allegations against impugned detective

OAKLAND — A Sacramento resident has been sentenced to 11 years in state prison for killing the father of his wife’s children in a 2021 shooting.

The plea deal came one year after defense attorneys for 34-year-old Donte Neal filed a motion accusing one of the detectives of paying off a person to make an “anonymous” call, leading to a break in the case. The Oakland police detective, Phong Tran, is already facing charges that he bribed a witness to influence her testimony in another case.

As part of the plea deal, Neal accepted a voluntary manslaughter conviction in the death of 31-year-old Byron Robinson. Prosecutors dropped murder and assault charges against Neal, who was transferred to state prison in late September, records show.

Robinson was shot and killed about 5:30 p.m. Nov. 6, 2021 on the 7400 block of Weld Street in East Oakland. Police allege Neal pulled up alongside Robinson’s car, fired five shots and drove off, spending the night in Rodeo before making his way back to Sacramento.

The case went unsolved for months. But court records say that just 48 hours after the homicide, Oakland police received an anonymous call implicating Neal, and provided Neal’s phone number. Police later used that number to establish Neal’s presence at the crime scene, and questioned him about his number when he was arrested and charged in February 2022.

Brian Cecilio Amaya, a lawyer representing Neal, filed a motion last year stating that the defense team doesn’t believe the anonymous call was truly spontaneous.

“Much like the allegations for which Officer Tran is currently awaiting trial for, defendant’s counsel asserts that Officer Tran paid the ‘anonymous’ caller to call him, provide him with this fake tip and provide Officer Tran with the alleged phone number of the defendant,” Amaya wrote in a legal motion. “This fake, ‘anonymous call,’ was used as basis for probable cause in the arrest warrant issued for the defendant’s arrest.”

When police arrested Neal, he allegedly claimed he was in Sacramento on the day Robinson was killed, and denied ever using his wife’s Mercedes, which police say was used in the drive-by shooting. Prosecutors say his cellphone locational data tells a different story: that Neal killed Robinson, stopped briefly in Rodeo and continued the rest of the way back to his home in Sacramento.

At the time of the homicide, Neal was on parole for a 2019 assault with a semiautomatic firearm conviction in Alameda County, court records show. His parole ended Jan. 4, a month before his arrest in this case.