Mansker reportedly began following Foley's restored 1971 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme after reportedly observing it weaving through freeway traffic. According to contemporary reports, Mansker followed Foley for nearly 30 miles, at times pulling alongside the vehicle and ordering him to stop. Mansker was not in a marked police vehicle and was wearing a T-shirt and jeans, circumstances Foley's attorney would later argue left Foley unaware that the stranger following him was a police officer.
The question of how clearly Mansker identified himself became one of the most consequential details of the case. Authorities said Mansker had a badge on his belt, although a Sheriff's lieutenant said shortly after the shooting that he did not believe Mansker displayed it to Foley while the two were driving. Mansker later testified that once the confrontation reached Foley's neighborhood, he identified himself as a police officer and ordered Foley and his passenger to stop.
Foley continued home, where the encounter escalated dramatically. Court records recount Mansker testifying that Foley approached him on foot while Foley's passenger, Lisa Maree Gaut, drove the Oldsmobile behind him. Mansker said he fired a warning shot into a dirt mound to demonstrate that his firearm was real, then fired two rounds at the hood of the Oldsmobile after Gaut drove toward him and he believed he was in danger of being struck.
Mansker then shot Foley after, according to authorities and Mansker's testimony, Foley reached toward his waistband while continuing to approach him. Foley was unarmed. He was struck in the knee or leg, hip or thigh, and hand and hospitalized with injuries that were not considered life-threatening, but their consequences for his football career would prove permanent.
The Chargers placed Foley on the non-football injury list almost immediately, costing him his estimated $775,000 salary for the 2006 season. He never returned to an NFL game and was released by the Chargers in March 2007, two years before his contract was scheduled to expire.
Mansker was placed on paid administrative leave following the shooting and later returned to duty. In December 2007, then-San Diego County District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis announced that Mansker would not face criminal charges, concluding after an investigation that he had reason to believe he was under attack and acted in self-defense.
Foley wasn't cleared of wrongdoing that night, either. In May 2007, he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor driving with a blood-alcohol level above California's legal limit and was sentenced to five years of probation, fined $1,756 and ordered to participate in a Mothers Against Drunk Driving event.
Foley, meanwhile, sued Mansker and the City of Coronado, seeking damages for medical expenses and lost past and future earnings. The case proceeded to a civil trial before the parties reached a $5.5 million settlement in July 2008, with Coronado paying the settlement and its insurer covering all but $100,000. The City did not admit liability.
Perhaps most significantly for what happened afterward, Coronado's city attorney acknowledged that the department changed its off-duty police procedures as a direct result of the Foley shooting. The precise encounter that prosecutors concluded did not warrant criminal charges therefore still produced both a substantial civil settlement and changes in how the department handled off-duty policing.
The shooting also became part of a broader debate over police use of force in San Diego County. In 2007, the ACLU of San Diego & Imperial Counties and other community organizations cited Foley's shooting while calling for state scrutiny of what they described as a pattern of questionable police shootings and concerns about how local cases were being investigated.
Two decades later, Mansker's career has continued at the same police department. His current LinkedIn profile identifies him as a Coronado Police Department corporal, a position he says he has held since December 2017, following an earlier assignment as a detective. He subsequently earned a bachelor's degree in Law Enforcement Leadership.
His own description of that career is striking when read against the controversy that has followed the Foley shooting. Mansker writes that he is dedicated to ensuring the public's trust through “the highest level of professionalism and integrity” and says that after becoming a corporal, his goal has been to train “the new generation of officers,” instilling those same values to maintain that trust. Elsewhere on the profile, he describes his job as a Coronado police officer in six words: “Protect life, property, and civil rights!”
Foley took a very different path. After leaving professional football, he moved to Houston, where his attorney said at the time that he was raising his daughter and planned to finish his college degree. The $5.5 million settlement provided some compensation for what had been lost, but it could not restore the NFL career that ended on Travertine Court before the Chargers' 2006 season had even begun.
The case remains complicated precisely because its central facts resist an easy hero-and-villain narrative. Foley was driving drunk and later admitted it in court. Mansker was an off-duty rookie who chose to follow him for miles in a personal vehicle while dressed as a civilian, and Foley's attorneys maintained that Foley did not understand that the man pursuing him was a police officer. By the time Mansker unmistakably identified himself as law enforcement, according to his own account, the encounter had reached Foley's residential neighborhood and spiraled into a confrontation involving a moving vehicle, a warning shot and ultimately an unarmed man being shot multiple times.
Prosecutors concluded Mansker's final use of deadly force was justified. Foley nevertheless received $5.5 million from Coronado, and the City changed its off-duty police procedures because of what happened. Those facts have coexisted for nearly two decades.
The questions that linger are therefore less about imagining that nothing happened before the shooting than about how differently everything might have ended. What if Mansker had reported the suspected drunk driver and waited for an on-duty marked unit? What if Foley had recognized immediately that the man following him was a police officer and stopped? What if the encounter had never followed Foley all the way to his home?
There is no way to replay September 3, 2006 with different decisions. There is only what followed: a football career that ended overnight, a police officer who remained on the force and rose through its ranks, a $5.5 million settlement, altered police procedures and one of the strangest and most consequential encounters between an athlete and law enforcement in San Diego history.
Twenty years later, Steve Foley never played another NFL game. Aaron Mansker is still publicly identified as a Coronado police corporal, now describing part of his mission as teaching the next generation of officers how to preserve the public's trust.
Originally published on September 3, 2026.
