Two men in Philadelphia got rid of a gun near a parked vehicle as police came toward them. Both ran. Both were caught. Both were charged with firearms offenses, and in both cases a judge of the Court of Common Pleas ordered the gun suppressed. The Commonwealth appealed both orders.
The Superior Court affirmed one suppression order and reversed the other, in published opinions filed two days apart in September 2026.
The cases are Commonwealth v. Thomas, 2026 PA Super 202 (Pa. Super. filed Sept. 16, 2026), and Commonwealth v. Serrano, 2026 PA Super 205 (Pa. Super. filed Sept. 18, 2026). What separates them is not what the two men did with the gun. It is which question each side put in front of the court, and how far down the chain of analysis the court had to go before it found an answer.
Neither opinion mentions the other, which is unsurprising given the two-day gap. Read together, though, they lay out the full structure of an abandoned-evidence suppression question.
The Chain of Questions Behind an Abandoned Gun
Before the two cases make sense side by side, it helps to lay out the analysis in order, because both opinions are really about where a case stops.
When a person throws something away, he ordinarily gives up any claim to privacy in it, and the police may pick it up and use it against him. In Pennsylvania a defendant charged with a possessory offense does not have to prove he owned the thing in order to get a hearing at all, under the rule of automatic standing that comes from Article I, Section 8 of the Pennsylvania Constitution. But standing only gets him through the door. As the Supreme Court explained in Commonwealth v. Enimpah, 106 A.3d 695, 698 (Pa. 2014), he must still show a privacy interest in the place searched or the item seized that society is prepared to recognize as reasonable.
That privacy question has its own burden structure. The Commonwealth goes first and must produce evidence that the defendant lacked a reasonable expectation of privacy. If it does, the burden of persuasion shifts to the defendant, who must establish that expectation by a preponderance of the evidence and may do it with circumstantial evidence. Commonwealth v. Anderson, 340 A.3d 297, 308 (Pa. 2025), citing Enimpah, 106 A.3d at 701.
Abandonment cuts the privacy interest off. Abandonment is a question of intent drawn from words, acts, and surrounding circumstances, and it is not enough that the property was left somewhere the public could reach; the evidence must show the person tried to separate himself from it. Commonwealth v. Coles, 317 A.3d 659, 664 (Pa. Super. 2024), quoting Commonwealth v. Barnette, 760 A.2d 1166, 1170–71 (Pa. Super. 2000).
There is one more step, and it decided Thomas. Since 1977, Pennsylvania has held that abandoned property “may not be utilized where the abandonment is coerced by unlawful police action.” Commonwealth v. Hall, 380 A.2d 1238, 1241 (Pa. 1977), reaffirmed last year in Commonwealth v. Lewis, 343 A.3d 1016, 1038 (Pa. 2025). A person who drops contraband because the police have unlawfully closed in on him has not really chosen to give it up. The police created the moment, so they do not get the benefit of it.
An abandonment argument can therefore fail in two different ways. The defendant may have kept a privacy interest and never let go of the thing, or he may have let go of it because unlawful police conduct made him. Serrano is a case about the first route and Thomas is a case about the second.
Thomas: The Six Seconds Nobody Recorded
A Philadelphia narcotics officer setting up surveillance on May 16, 2024 saw a man adjusting a rectangular object near his hip and put out a radio call that a man might have a gun. Officer Jared Ross answered it. He was alone, out of uniform, and driving an unmarked car. He stopped in the traffic lane on Smedley Street, got out, and walked toward Stephon Thomas.
Ross’s body-worn camera was recording video but no sound. The audio did not switch on until the one-minute mark, by which point the chase was over. For six seconds after Ross stepped out of the car, the video does not show Thomas at all. Thomas becomes visible at ten seconds, behind a parked car marked “Atlas” and facing away. He ducks down beside it at eleven seconds. The gun ends up at the wheel well. He runs, and he is caught.
Two findings carried the suppression ruling, and both survived review.
The first was that Ross was not credible about what he said. He testified that he said something like “Yo, buddy, do you have ID?”, which is the ordinary script of a mere encounter, since asking for identification does not by itself seize anyone. The recording had no sound at that point, and the suppression court held the silence against the officer rather than the defendant. It relied on a Philadelphia police directive requiring officers to activate body-worn cameras before “conducting any vehicle or pedestrian investigation,” found that this veteran officer “deliberately” left his camera off until the interaction was underway, and described that “willful failure” as having deprived the court of contemporaneous evidence. The Superior Court held that discrediting the officer on that basis was not clear and manifest error, the standard that governs review of a suppression court’s credibility findings. Commonwealth v. McMaster, 320 A.3d 85, 88 (Pa. Super. 2024). A footnote marks the edge of the holding: the Commonwealth never argued the directive was an improper thing for a judge to weigh, and the panel cited Commonwealth v. Cox, 240 A.3d 509, 533 (Pa. 2020), which recognizes an exception to appellate deference where a credibility finding rests on a consideration the court should not have used.
The second finding was that Ross approached with his gun drawn. The video does not show the weapon until the thirteen-second mark, after Thomas had ducked down. But Ross testified that “initially,” before Thomas ran, his service weapon “was pointed up.” His own words filled the gap the camera left. The Commonwealth answered that Thomas never saw the gun, since he had turned away and was wearing a hood. The panel turned that around: Thomas is invisible for six seconds after the officer got out, and a fair inference from a man turning away from an approaching officer is that he turned because he saw the weapon. The display of a weapon has been on the list of factors that convert a conversation into a seizure since United States v. Mendenhall, 446 U.S. 544 (1980), and Pennsylvania applies the same list today. Commonwealth v. Hampton, 204 A.3d 452, 457 (Pa. Super. 2019). In a second footnote, the panel set aside the argument that holding a weapon at one’s side is a sensible safety measure for an officer who suspects a gun. The question asks what a reasonable person in the defendant’s position would have understood, not whether the officer behaved reasonably.
Judge Kunselman wrote for the panel and Judge Dubow joined. Judge Sullivan noted a dissent without writing separately.
Thomas also carries a procedural holding that has no counterpart in Serrano. The suppression court first denied suppression, then granted reconsideration and reversed itself more than thirty days later. The panel addressed on its own motion whether the court could do that and held that it could, because a pretrial suppression order does not dispose of all charges at a docket and is therefore interlocutory, which puts it outside the thirty-day limit in 42 Pa.C.S. § 5505. Commonwealth v. James, 69 A.3d 180 (Pa. 2013). The panel then added a caution: it does not endorse the procedure, because Pa.R.Crim.P. 581(J) makes a denial of suppression final absent newly available evidence, and Thomas appears to have shown none. A Rule 581(J) violation is not a jurisdictional defect, so an appellate court cannot raise it on its own, and the Commonwealth never preserved the objection.
Serrano: The Bag That Was Already in the Truck
On August 26, 2024, Officers Daniel Ransom and Brendan McCauley were on patrol in a marked car, both in uniform. A fellow officer phoned to report a person of interest, Cameron Serrano, standing near Reese and Somerset Streets in Philadelphia, wearing a white T-shirt, shorts, and a black fanny pack. The caller sent a photograph and gave Serrano’s date of birth. Ransom ran a warrant search on the car’s computer and found an active arrest warrant.
When the officers arrived, Serrano was crouching behind a parked pick-up truck. He popped up and began backing away. Ransom got out and tried to engage him. Serrano kept moving away, and when Ransom asked to speak with him, he ran. Officers caught him after a short chase. He had no keys to the truck on his person.
Meanwhile, McCauley looked at the area where Serrano had been crouching and saw a black satchel sitting on the floor of the truck bed. The bed had four walls about a foot and a half high, and the tailgate was closed, but there was no cover over it and it was open to the air. McCauley reached in, took the satchel to the police car, searched it, and found a gun.
The suppression court held that McCauley seized the satchel from the truck bed without a warrant and without any exception to the warrant requirement, that the seizure violated the Pennsylvania Constitution, and that the gun was the fruit of it. In explaining itself, the court said the only evidence the Commonwealth offered on Serrano’s lack of a privacy interest was that he had no truck keys on him, and that this alone did not show the truck was not his. Because the initial burden was the Commonwealth’s, the court said, the gap in the evidence fell on the Commonwealth.
The Superior Court reversed. President Judge Lazarus wrote, joined by Judge Sullivan and President Judge Emeritus Stevens.
The panel found two problems. The suppression court correctly stated the Enimpah burden-shifting rule but did not apply it against the totality of the circumstances, and the record did not match the court’s own description of it. The Commonwealth had offered more than the missing keys. The truck was legally parked on a public street in a residential neighborhood in front of a house; Serrano was never seen operating it and there was no suggestion he had; and McCauley testified that he saw no one inside the truck and no one claiming it.
The deeper problem was the question the suppression court asked. It reasoned that the absence of keys did not suggest “that the vehicle was not [Serrano’s].” But ownership has not been the test for decades. Byrd v. United States, 584 U.S. 395, 404–05 (2018), holds that a person need not have a recognized property interest to claim an expectation of privacy in a car, and that legitimate presence alone is not enough either. Anderson says the same for Pennsylvania: evidence of lawful possession or control generally suffices, and proof of ownership is neither required nor decisive. Asking whether the Commonwealth disproved ownership set the bar in the wrong place.
The panel then sorted the case law by a simple line. In every case where a defendant was found to have a reasonable expectation of privacy in a vehicle, the officers had seen him inside it. In Anderson he was driving. In Byrd he was the driver and sole occupant of a rental car he was not technically permitted to drive. Even in Enimpah, where the Commonwealth lost because it produced no evidence at all, the defendant was a passenger. The closest match to Serrano is Commonwealth v. Millner, 888 A.2d 680, 682–83, 692 (Pa. 2005), where the defendant stood at the driver’s side of a parked car and tossed items into it. The Supreme Court found no reasonable expectation of privacy, and held that putting a firearm into a car is not itself enough to establish a connection to it.
Having decided Serrano had no privacy interest in the truck, the panel turned to the bag and found abandonment. Serrano crouched behind the truck, backed away when the officers arrived, and then ran, leaving the bag behind. He did not stay near it and nothing suggested he meant to come back. That distinguishes the cases where courts have refused to find abandonment, such as Smith v. Ohio, 494 U.S. 541, 543–44 (1990), where the defendant tried to protect the sack he had thrown on his car hood, and Commonwealth v. Sanders, 595 A.2d 635, 637 (Pa. Super. 1991), where placing a pouch on a nearby hood and staying put was too equivocal to show intent to give it up. It puts Serrano alongside Commonwealth v. Byrd, 987 A.2d 786, 791 (Pa. Super. 2009), where a defendant discarded a handgun under an SUV parked on a public street and walked away. His remaining argument, that leaving something in a private owner’s truck bed should count for more than leaving it on public ground, drew no supporting authority; Pennsylvania courts have refused to find a privacy interest in items discarded on third-party property as readily as on public property.
Two things the panel did not decide. In a footnote, it observed with displeasure that the Commonwealth never took the simple step of running the truck’s registration, which would have resolved the whole question. And in another, it declined to answer what the suppression court had treated as a question of first impression: whether the open bed of a pick-up truck carries the same privacy protection as the interior of the vehicle. The suppression court had said it does, likening items left in a truck bed to “the chattels of a house.” The panel did not have to reach it, because Serrano had no interest in the truck either way, and it closed the footnote by saying that Serrano might have prevailed on that argument, but that it requires analysis.
Where the Two Cases Meet, and Where They Part
Put the two records next to each other and the facts look close. A man is approached by police in Philadelphia, he gets rid of a gun in or near a parked vehicle he has no apparent connection to, and he runs.
Under the abandonment case law, that behavior favors the Commonwealth. Commonwealth v. Byrd is nearly the Thomasfact pattern: a gun under a parked vehicle on a public street, and the defendant walking away. Thomas dropped his gun at the wheel well of a car marked “Atlas,” and nothing in the opinion suggests the car was his. On the Serrano path, the Commonwealth in Thomas had a threshold argument available, which is that Thomas had no reasonable expectation of privacy in a stranger’s wheel well, so searching that space violated nothing of his.
It did not make that argument. The Thomas panel said expressly that the Commonwealth pressed only one theory, that the interaction with Officer Ross was a mere encounter, and confined its review accordingly. Having lost that single theory, the Commonwealth had nothing else in the case. It did not argue in the alternative that Ross had reasonable suspicion to detain a man he had just been told was carrying a gun, so the panel never considered whether the seizure was lawful, only whether it was a seizure.
Serrano runs the other way. There the Commonwealth put the threshold privacy question front and center, and the case never got as far as the lawfulness of the officers’ approach. Serrano ran from the police too, but whether that flight was provoked by an unlawful show of authority was never the question presented. The panel answered the question in front of it and stopped.
There is a factual difference underneath the framing difference, and it matters. In Thomas, the gun left the defendant’s hand during the police interaction, which is what put the coercion rule in play. In Serrano, the bag was already sitting in the truck bed before the officers arrived. The panel corrected the Commonwealth on this point in a footnote: the officers testified that Serrano was not holding the bag when they pulled up, and McCauley found it when he looked over at the truck. What happened during the police approach in Serrano was the walking away and the running, which the panel treated as the act of separating himself from a bag he had already put down.
That leaves one question that neither opinion answers, because neither opinion had occasion to. Serrano says in a footnote that once property is abandoned a defendant has no standing to contest its search and seizure at all. Thomas says an abandonment coerced by unlawful police action does not count as an abandonment. Both are settled statements of Pennsylvania law, and they sit in a particular order: coercion has to be asked before abandonment can be treated as final.