2 men charged with gun crimes after Gilman shooting
Berkeley police say Alex Foster fired a gun through his ceiling into his neighbor's apartment at Gilman and Curtis. No one was hurt.
A longtime felon has now been charged in connection with a shooting investigation in northwest Berkeley that closed an intersection for hours Monday.
According to court records, 31-year-old Alex Foster was charged with shooting into an occupied apartment, possessing a firearm and ammunition and other crimes.
Berkeley police say Foster fired a gun through his ceiling into his neighbor's apartment at Gilman and Curtis streets. No one was hurt.
Records indicate the shooting took place Monday sometime before 8:30 a.m.
Read more about shootings in Berkeley.
On Monday morning, Berkeley police went to investigate the gunfire report, confirmed there had been a shooting and froze the scene until they could locate Foster, who was not home when they arrived.
Several hours later, police spotted Foster and a second man at his apartment and then followed him to San Pablo Avenue in Albany where they arrested the pair without incident, according to radio dispatches reviewed by The Scanner.
BPD also recovered a gun in their car during the arrest, police said.
Emilie Raguso
On Tuesday, the Alameda County DA's office charged Foster with six felonies: the Gilman Street shooting, possession of a firearm and ammunition by a prohibited person, carrying a concealed firearm in a vehicle, carrying a loaded firearm and possession of a controlled substance while armed, according to court records.
Codefendant Zachary Harris, 32, of Pinole was also charged with several felonies related to gun possession as well as two misdemeanors: possession of burglary tools and disobeying a court order, according to arrest records.
The men appear to have known each other for some time: They were charged together in 2012 in an Alameda County assault case that involved a firearm, according to court records. Both were later convicted in that case after a plea deal.
Harris has just two other criminal cases in Alameda County, dating back to 2011, and both were low-level misdemeanors.
Foster, on the other hand, racked up a long list of felony cases in Alameda County after the assault conviction, according to court records.
He was charged with felony assault likely to produce great bodily injury in 2013 and later convicted, resulting in a five-year probation sentence through late 2018.
In 2016, he was charged with a Berkeley robbery but later took a plea deal to misdemeanor battery that put him on probation through mid-2019.
In 2017, he was charged with auto theft but the case was later dismissed.
In 2020, Foster was charged with ammunition and gun possession as well as being an accessory after the fact, but most of those charges were dropped due to a plea deal with an accessory conviction.
The deal put Foster on probation from May 2024 to May 2026.
In 2021, Foster was charged with felony assault with a deadly weapon and related crimes but took a plea deal for a misdemeanor, resulting in a year of unsupervised probation.
He later spent more than four months in jail when he violated his probation.
In March 2022, Foster was charged with felony assault likely to produce great bodily injury and other crimes, including having committed the assault — a stabbing at the Berkeley Dollar Tree — after being released from jail on his own recognizance.
The plea deal in that case saw a conviction for felony assault, with most of the other charges dismissed, and a two-year probation sentence.
In February 2023, Foster was charged in another felony assault case, which was dismissed last year when he was sent to prison briefly for the 2022 stabbing conviction due to a probation violation.
According to booking records, Foster's bail in the new case was set at $262,500 but he is ineligible for release due to his prior convictions.
Harris is being held on $125,000 bail.
Both men are now set for arraignment Wednesday at Wiley Manuel Courthouse in Oakland, according to booking records.
Their booking photographs were not immediately available. This story will be updated when they are.
As of June 3, Berkeley has had seven shootings in 2025, including one by police. Last year, there were 15 shootings in the same period.
