Harry and Joanne were waiting at a red light at Bush and Montgomery when a yellow tow truck backed toward their Toyota. Its lifting arm was coming down. Both of them were still inside the car.
It was the morning of April 9, 2024. The East Bay couple had come to San Francisco to run errands in their 2017 Corolla. At first, Joanne thought the truck was there for the Waymo in the next lane. Then it kept coming toward them, she told ABC7.
“We were at a stoplight and minding our own business.”
Another driver makes room
The footage shows the Corolla reversing as the truck follows it backward, the towing mechanism lowered close to the pavement. The truck carries the name Specialty Towing. A black sedan behind the Toyota leaves Harry little room to maneuver.
When the light turns green, the Waymo leaves. The black sedan backs up, opening a gap. Harry gets around the truck and drives away along Montgomery Street, The San Francisco Standard reported.
The truck follows. Joanne said it pursued them for several blocks before they got away. She told ABC7 that the car was paid off and its registration was current. The couple returned to the East Bay.
Jeff Ferland, a software engineer walking back to his office, recorded the encounter. He had also initially thought the truck was responding to a disabled Waymo. Afterward, he called the police non-emergency line to report what he had seen, he told SFGATE.
Harry said finding the recording online helped after the couple’s account had been met with disbelief during their call to 911. By April 11, SFPD confirmed it had taken a report. No injuries or arrests had been reported, and the investigation remained open, The Standard reported.
The name was already familiar to the city
City Attorney David Chiu had been investigating towing businesses before the video appeared. He told ABC7 that Specialty Towing was affiliated with Auto Towing, which his office accused of taking vehicles from a private lot without the property owner’s permission.
Chiu also described limited pickup hours and pressure to pay cash. ABC7’s reporter called the number on a truck and visited Auto Towing’s Bayview lot seeking a response. A person answering the phone denied a connection between the businesses.
The Standard also reported initial uncertainty about the truck’s ownership, with a dispatcher disputing a connection to the suspended business.
In July 2024, the city won an order barring Auto Towing from bidding on or receiving city contracts for five years. Officials said it had taken at least six vehicles from a Portola bank’s parking lot without the bank’s authorization. The order restricted city contracting, KQED reported.
One driver had already spent years fighting the operation. Sammy Hallaq told KQED that Auto Towing took his vehicle from a Bayview grocery-store lot in 2019, then sent him to the wrong place to retrieve it. He paid $504, took the dispute to small claims court and won a $4,016 judgment. In July 2024, he was still pursuing payment.
The owner’s later prison sentence
On February 12, 2026, a federal judge sentenced Jose Vicente Badillo, an owner and operator of Auto Towing and Specialty Towing, to five years in prison for an arson conspiracy. He had pleaded guilty the previous October.
Badillo admitted organizing the burning of six trucks belonging to four competing companies in 2023. His aims included steering business to his own companies and retaliating against competitors, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
The following day, another judge sentenced him to 27 months in a separate insurance-fraud case. Prosecutors said he staged an accident involving a tow truck and a vehicle carrier and generated false towing records. The two prison terms run concurrently.
Those cases concerned arson and insurance fraud, not the attempted tow at Bush and Montgomery. Harry had planned to stop at his office a few blocks away that morning. After the encounter, he told The Standard, he decided to go straight home.