Nearly two years ago, a Mercedes SUV traveling at high speed careened into oncoming traffic near West Portal Muni Station, drove onto the sidewalk, and crashed into a family of four as they waited at a bus stop to visit the San Francisco Zoo. Brazilian citizen Diego Cardoso de Oliveira, 40, an employee at Apple; his wife, 38-year-old Matilde Moncada Ramos Pinto, an executive producer at Ridley Scott Films; and their two children, a toddler and an infant, were struck. Cardoso de Oliveira and his 1-year-old son, Joaquim Ramos Pinto de Oliveira, were killed immediately. Ramos Pinto and 3-month-old Cauê Ramos Pinto de Oliveira were hospitalized with serious injuries and died days later.
The driver, Mary Fong Lau, was arrested on suspicion of vehicular manslaughter, reckless driving, and driving the wrong way on the road. Authorities said her speed at the time of the collision topped 70 miles per hour.
As if the family of the victims hasn’t suffered enough, last month, San Francisco Superior Court Judge Bruce Chan expressed sympathy for the now 80-year-old Lau and stated it was unlikely she would serve any jail time or even a community service mandate after pleading no contest to four felony counts of gross vehicular manslaughter. Now, according to the Asian American Bar Association newsletter, Chan is planning to retire this year. His term ends in 2029, meaning yet another lenient judge will face his bad decisions at the ballot box.
After Lau changed her plea from not guilty to no contest, Chan said his duty “was to balance the deaths with the other factors of the case.” Those factors included Lau’s age, her lack of criminal history, and “her remorse,” as well as the fact that her own husband had died in a car accident early on in their marriage.”
Chan even injected some hearsay into the proceedings, saying that in the hospital after the crash, “Lau tearfully told medical staff she wished she could trade places with the family.”
Chan said Lau would “spend the rest of her days living with the knowledge of the harm she has caused to others” and indicated his sentence would probably be two to three years of probation, during which time Lau would be prohibited from driving. Because she is 80, the soon-to-retire Chan said prison time would be sentencing Lau “to die within the state prison system.”
Remorseful killers don’t hide their assets
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, in July 2024, the surviving parents of Cardoso de Oliveira and Ramos Pinto filed a wrongful death civil suit against Lau. In May 2025, the relatives filed another civil lawsuit, this time asking a judge to void alleged financial transfers that Lau made after the first civil lawsuit was filed. The victims’ families accused Lau of transferring her ownership interest in several properties to new limited liability companies and selling properties to third parties, including her son-in-law, thereby transferring millions of dollars to avoid potential financial penalties from the civil suit. Hiding assets doesn’t sound like remorse to me. In fact, it reminds me of two other San Francisco cases I’ve covered where transportation-related killers got off easy while showing no remorse at all.
Chris Bucchere
On March 29, 2012, 71-year-old Sutchi Hui was in a crosswalk at Market and Castro streets with his wife of 50 years when he was struck by a bicyclist named Chris Bucchere. While Bucchere sustained minor injuries, Hui later died. Just hours after the crash, Bucchere was on the Mission Cycling A.M. Riders’ Google group message board, stating, “I was already way too committed to stop. … I couldn’t see a line through the crowd and I couldn’t stop, so I laid it down and just plowed through the crowded crosswalk … .” He closed his post by lamenting that his bike helmet, in his words, “committed the ultimate sacrifice.” It seemed to me at the time it was Hui who committed the ultimate sacrifice, but that didn’t seem to concern Bucchere as much as his helmet.
This cavalier attitude infuriated many and caught the attention of then San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón, who filed felony vehicular manslaughter charges against Bucchere. The case took a turn, however, when investigators from the D.A.’s office retrieved surveillance video that showed the light turned red as the speeding cyclist entered the intersection and it was too late for him to stop and avoid the crash.
A pretrial deal was struck: Bucchere pleaded guilty to manslaughter, allowing Gascón to term it a felony but also calling for the charge to be dropped to a misdemeanor after Bucchere completed 1,000 hours of community service.
In a 2018 phone interview with the Chronicle’s Matier & Ross, Bucchere was as cavalier as ever, saying, “The video was incredibly lucky and it definitely saved me from jail, but it couldn’t stop Gascón’s vendetta against cyclists.”
He also referred to the case as “a TV felony,” accusing Gascón of using him to advance his political career, making him the “unlucky victim” of prosecutorial misconduct and bias, as well as a feeding frenzy by the media (I assume he’s talking in part about me). The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition and their supporters attacked me (including a couple of death threats) for calling out Bucchere in The Marina Times, along with other non-law-abiding cyclists. In a classic tale of hypocrisy, those same two-wheel defenders didn’t have a word to say when, in 2021, the social justice inspired district attorney they supported, Chesa Boudin, allowed a driver who struck a bicyclist to get away with murder.
Hiding assets doesn’t sound like remorse to me. It reminds me of two other San Francisco cases where transportation-related killers got off easy while showing no remorse.
Farrukh Mushtaq
On June 22, 2016, at around 8:30 p.m., a man in a BMW X3 SUV ran a red light near the South and Market intersection of Seventh and Howard streets, fatally striking 26-year-old bicyclist Katherine Slattery and fleeing the scene. The driver, Farrukh Mushtaq, 32, was apprehended by police a few blocks away. The next day Mushtaq pleaded not guilty to felony vehicular manslaughter, misdemeanor hit and run, and felony hit and run.
The night before the incident, Mushtaq and another man went to the Marina District, where they used cocaine and picked up prostitutes. They talked about partying more together on Thursday. On Wednesday, Mushtaq met with human resources and an attorney for his employer, RockYou, to review his work performance and discuss how he could improve it. Mushtaq told them he should “get a raise and a better position.”
At 5 p.m. Mushtaq left work and texted a friend that he was going to the Gold Club, a strip club on Howard Street. Turns out, he had been at the club during his lunch break, where his wife sent him an email saying she knew he was transferring $1,300 to the Gold Club. At the same time, Mushtaq was having multiple text conversations with individuals about going to Las Vegas and with a friend about job hunting.
According to the Gold Club, when Mushtaq returned in the evening he tried to disable a light in one of the rooms and was asked to leave. He then tried to reenter the club multiple times, even changing his shirt. When he was refused, he pulled up in his BMW and asked if they had valet service, pretending to arrive for the first time.
Meanwhile, Mushtaq was communicating with his wife, who said, “Your daughter has the statue of the groom from our wedding cake and she’s walking around with it while you’re spending money at the strip club.” As Mushtaq was leaving, his wife showed up at the Gold Club to confront him, at which point he took off down Howard Street, going over 80 miles an hour and running the red light at Seventh Street. After changing lanes abruptly to avoid a car stopped in lane one, Mushtaq collided with Slattery on her bike — but he didn’t stop. At Ninth Street he got out of his car, and it rolled back into another vehicle. He was on his cell phone but never called 911. Good Samaritans kept him there until police arrived.
Mushtaq tried to evade responsibility by using an absurd defense (“God was driving!”) in an attempt to get into mental health diversion. The judge wasn’t swayed. In the courtroom, he also came across as a selfish rake who abandoned his wife and daughter to snort cocaine, pick up hookers, and spend thousands of dollars at a strip joint. He was, in fact, the polar opposite of his victim, Kate Slattery, who by all accounts was an amazing young woman. Slattery was a mechanical engineer, and she wanted to show young girls that they, too, could grow up to be engineers. At the time of her death, she was writing a book entitled Fly with Maya, about a curious child who travels around the world in a hot air balloon, meeting engineers along her journey who tell her about their jobs and help her understand how her balloon works. After Slattery’s death, her family finished the book.
On June 17, 2021, before Judge Braden C. Woods, then District Attorney Chesa Boudin’s office agreed to a plea deal, meaning a man who recklessly killed a young woman riding her bike and showed zero remorse wouldn’t spend a single day in jail for it.
Which brings me back to Mary Fong Lau. The fact she is 80 years old should not be a get out of jail free card after killing a young family with their entire lives ahead of them. The lack of remorse — moving assets to keep them from the grieving survivors — is also key. Chan’s decision may also prevent the family from receiving damages because no-contest pleas are not admissions of guilt for civil cases, so because of that no-contest plea, Lau can still deny responsibility in the pending wrongful death lawsuit.
Judge Chan can still reconsider his sentencing decision and hold a hearing to determine if Lau did transfer assets to avoid liability, but all of this is little consolation for the dead family’s survivors. Perhaps most disturbing, court observers noted that while Lau cried crocodile tears before the judge, in the Hall of Justice hallway after the hearing Lau and her supporters gathered around her smiling attorney. “It’s good news. It’s going to be the end of this chapter,” he said, at which point a rousing cheer rose from the group.