Luis
"He didn’t understand what they were saying."
Earlier today, I was sitting at my desk, working and listening to music on my noise-cancelling headphones. Suddenly everyone around me stands up, grabs their laptops and bags, and starts moving towards the back of the office. One person approaches me. I take out an earbud, thinking they’re about to tell me to come to an impromptu meeting, and they say “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?” I ask.
“Shots fired outside.”
I grab my laptop and my bag and start moving back with everyone else. We stand around, confused, before someone declares that the police now have the area under control, and the suspect was “down”.
Against my better judgement, I move to the front of the office where a few other people are looking out of the window, and pull aside the blind. I don’t see the victim, but I can see the head of a paramedic bobbing up and down from behind a parked car, performing CPR.
A frightening amount of blood is pouring out from under the car and onto the street.
Luis showed up a few months ago on Shotwell Street with a few other homeless people. At first, I was wary of him. I assumed he had mild mental health issues. He had a habit of kicking and throwing various balls around on the street, against walls, or along the sidewalk. Sometimes he’d just jog around the block.
He never directly interacted with me, and we quickly learned that he was harmless, like everyone else on the street. I also found out later that he’d occasionally kick a soccer ball to random, friendly-looking people – like Jesse, who’d have fun kicking it back to him.
Like everyone else in the world, he was trying to get by the best way he knew how. He wasn’t there to hurt anyone.
After a few minutes, some of us moved outside to ask the police what happened. They told us that he had a large knife, and refused to drop it or get on the ground. They said he tried to charge at them, and that’s when they shot him with the beanbag rifle.
According to the police, the beanbags weren’t “effective”, so they opened fire.
I show an officer where our security camera is, in case it’s helpful. I was thankful that they’d responded to the situation so quickly. I thought, what if I was out there with the knife-wielding maniac?
Then I left for an appointment.
At home, later that afternoon, I logged on to start working, and started seeing the news stories pop up:
“a suspect brandishing a 10-12 inch knife”
“the suspect refused to drop the knife”
“to protect the public from harm, the officers had to discharge their weapons”
But…
I stumbled across video interviews with two other homeless people from the street (who I recognize). They’re crying. They know his name.
They say it’s José, but it’s actually Luis.
They say they’re always telling him to stop kicking the ball around because it annoys them.
They say he barely speaks English.
They say he never charged at police.
They say the knife was tucked into his waistband.
They say he was walking in circles, confused, because he didn’t understand what the police were saying, because he barely speaks English.
They say everyone carries a knife around here for protection.
They say he never threatened anyone, not even today.
Another eyewitness account says he never charged at police, and that he was already on the ground when he was shot.
“From the video, it appears that the officer came at the situation guns blazing,” said Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the city’s Coalition on Homelessness. “Basic principles of de-escalation were not followed. The officer did not create ‘time and distance.’ No verbal de-escalation was conducted at all.”
While the video does not show the shooting itself, police officials said at a news conference Friday that witnesses to the killing have described Gongora lunging at the officers before they fired, contradicting three witnesses who provided accounts to The Chronicle and said Gongora had not directly threatened the officers.
“He didn’t charge the officers,” said John Visor, 33, who was living in a tent on Shotwell Street and said he was roughly 10 feet from Gongora when police arrived. “He was going in circles. He didn’t understand what they were saying. They just shot him. They just shot him.”