Eric Bigone did almost everything a San Francisco tenant is supposed to do when a landlord wants him gone: he refused to leave, he kept trying to pay his rent, and he hired a lawyer. Prosecutors and a wrongful-death lawsuit now allege that when those protections held, his landlord had him ambushed and shot dead outside his Outer Sunset home.

The killing of Bigone, 58, has been covered as a shocking true-crime story — a retired dentist charged with murdering his own tenant. But the court records point at something more uncomfortable for the city's housing debate: the legal machinery meant to shield tenants from eviction was, by the lawsuit's own account, working. Bigone had counsel, had just-cause protection, and had called his landlord's bluff on a fabricated eviction threat. What the law could not do was stop a landlord who, prosecutors allege, decided a single-family home is worth more empty.

On June 9, Dino Bigone — Eric's son and the representative of his estate — filed a wrongful-death lawsuit (external source, opens in a new tab) in San Francisco Superior Court seeking damages and a court order freezing any sale of the Outer Sunset house his father had rented since 2023. The defendants are landlord Philippe Chagniot, 68, and his wife, Barbara.

The complaint, detailed by ABC7 (external source, opens in a new tab), reads as a catalog of pressure tactics that failed one by one. Starting in January, it alleges, the couple sent unlawful notices to enter, threatened eviction, and refused to accept Bigone's $3,200 monthly rent — money they had demanded only in cash since 2023, the suit says, to keep it off their tax filings. Bigone answered by hiring an attorney to keep the payments flowing. The couple then told him they would invoke the Ellis Act to pull the unit off the rental market, according to the complaint — a threat, prosecutors and the suit agree, they never actually filed.

That empty threat is the tell. The Ellis Act is the lawful route for an owner to quit the rental business and clear a building; invoking it leaves a paper trail and triggers relocation rights for tenants. District Attorney Brooke Jenkins's office says Chagniot skipped it. Before dawn on May 17, according to the DA's account relayed by Mission Local (external source, opens in a new tab), he biked to the house, lit a fire atop Bigone's car, and shot the tenant in the back with a silenced, fully automatic Mac-10 when he stepped outside — then fired a second time as he lay on the ground.

The question the crime coverage mostly left alone is why a tenant of three years was so exposed to his landlord's whims. Single-family homes like Bigone's are partially exempt from San Francisco rent control (external source, opens in a new tab) under the state's 1995 Costa-Hawkins Act, which forbids cities from capping their rents. What the exemption leaves untouched is just-cause eviction protection — and that is the shield the lawsuit describes holding. Crucially, it did not make removing Bigone impossible; it made it expensive and visible. A landlord who wants to sell can still clear a tenant, but only for a lawful reason and, in a sale, only after paying thousands of dollars in relocation costs — a process that leaves a record.

To Steve MacDonald, a landlord-tenant attorney since 1982, the case began as an ordinary dispute: an owner who wanted to sell, and a renter he needed gone. What was not ordinary was the exit Chagniot allegedly chose. City law let him evict for just cause and sell, MacDonald told ABC7 (external source, opens in a new tab), but only after paying thousands in relocation money — a step he never took before he "resorted to violence." The lawsuit describes a landlord free to raise the rent at will yet bound, if he wanted Bigone gone, to that lawful and costly path — one who is alleged to have reached for arson and a machine gun instead of a court filing and a relocation check.

The alleged motive was money. An empty single-family house, MacDonald estimated, could sell for roughly $200,000 more than one with a tenant inside. And the alleged cruelty outlived the killing: the day after the shooting, the suit says, Barbara Chagniot phoned Dino to offer condolences and, in the same call, asked when he would clear out the building; her husband sent his own condolence message that same day.

Bigone, a laborer for the SFPUC, was a fixture in the Outer Sunset. "He was remorseful. He changed his life," Mark Foti, a friend of 40 years, told the San Francisco Standard (external source, opens in a new tab). "He said God helped him live, to help people."

City law let him evict for just cause and sell, MacDonald told ABC7, but only after paying thousands in relocation money — a step he never took before he "resorted to violence."

Chagniot was arrested May 28, denies the charges, and remains in custody. He is due back in court in late August (external source, opens in a new tab), the next step before a preliminary hearing is scheduled. The murder charge carries a special-circumstance allegation that Chagniot lay in wait, which — if proven — opens the door to a sentence of life without parole.