Former KTVU anchorman Frank Somerville, who has had a rough couple of years battling alcoholism and losing his prime local media gig, has been sentenced in connection with a drunken domestic incident in Berkeley last June.
As you may recall, Somerville, 66, was last in the news himself in early June 2023, after a pair of incidents in which he showed up, apparently intoxicated, at the home of his brother, Mark Somerville — or a family home where the brother was staying.
Earlier in the evening of June 5, 2023, Somerville appeared and was refused entry to the home, and got into a physical altercation with his brother outside. Berkeley police were called, Somerville was arrested on suspicion of public intoxication, assault, making criminal threats, and violating probation — all misdemeanors, with the latter stemming from his previous arrest for a DUI in 2021.
After being released from jail that night, Somerville apparently returned to the home and rang the doorbell repeatedly at 3:30 am on June 6, demanding some sort of property of his.
Police were again called, and Somerville was arrested this time for driving while intoxicated, which police apparently observed this time, which was again a parole violation.
As the Chronicle reports today, an Alameda County Superior Court judge approved a plea deal Monday in which Somerville has pleaded no contest to alcohol-related reckless driving and the probation violation, paying a $829 fine and agreeing to 30 days in jail.
Somerville's defense attorney painted a different picture for the judge when it came to the altercation with his brother, saying that he had come to the house to discuss something with their father relating to Frank's adopted daughter, and Mark Somerville refused to let him in.
In the altercation, the attorney said, Mark Somerville suffered a self-inflicted wound from an attempted head-butt. And, the attorney said, Somerville had returned to the home later that night to retrieve his car and a cellphone he thought he had left there, in order to call a bail bondsman.
"I think I’ve been vindicated," Somerville told the Chronicle after Monday's sentencing, referring to how the case had been overcharged. He added, "This doesn’t mean that I wasn’t responsible for some things."
Somerville was put on leave from KTVU after a Memorial Day broadcast in 2021 in which he appeared to be slurring his words and having trouble reading from his teleprompter. He would return briefly later that summer, blaming the incident on Ambien, but was out again within a month or so due to an apparent dispute with management over the coverage of the Gabby Petito case — Somerville was insistant that the station address the phenomenon of "missing white woman syndrome."
By November of that year, Somerville was saying publicly that he was likely being let go from the station, and then less than two months later, he got into a DUI crash in downtown Oakland one night that led to his first arrest.
A year later, in December 2022, Somerville would publicly address his addiction issues, saying that he was abstaining from alcohol completely. But that was clearly not the case six months later, when the Berkeley altercation occurred.
Previously: Former KTVU Anchor Frank Somerville Arrested Again In Alleged Intoxicated Incidents In Berkeley