Amilcar Perez-Lopez was a 20-year-old Guatemalan immigrant shot to death by police officers who said he lunged at them with a knife. Eyewitnesses, after being ‘driven underground’, say he was running for his life

Outside the Red Poppy Art House in San Francisco’s Mission district, a newly painted mural glows in the afternoon sun. Two of the men etched on the wall are instantly recognisable: to the right stands Eric Garner, the unarmed black man killed by police in New York City; Michael Brown, the unarmed black teenager killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri, stands to the left. But framed in the middle is a face hardly anyone from beyond the streets of this historically working class area would have ever noticed.

Amilcar Perez-Lopez was 20 years old when he was shot dead by two plain-clothed San Francisco police officers in February. An undocumented migrant and Guatemalan national, he is pictured at the bottom of the mural, his hands up, clutching a copy of Huey P Newton’s Revolutionary Suicide.

He was killed two blocks away from the mural. The gallery’s owners heard the gunshots go off.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Amilcar Perez-Lopez with his hands up on a mural, which also includes Eric Garner and Michael Brown. Photograph: Oliver Laughland/The Guardian

Perez-Lopez was one of the 67 Latino people identified by the Guardian as killed by police so far this year. Like 58% of them, he carried no firearm; 25% were completely unarmed. Yet his death and those of all the other Latino 67 have failed to spark the kind of outrage seen after the deaths of Garner and Brown. Those who witnessed the event – also undocumented migrants – have been “driven underground”, lawyers tell the Guardian.

Indeed, in five cases of Latino deaths identified by the Guardian’s investigative accounting of law enforcement-related deaths in the US this year, media reporting failed to even document the individual’s name.



The manner of Perez-Lopez’s death varies according to which account you hear. The San Francisco police, long in the spotlight for unarmed killings and now for a barrage of racist text messages, have said Perez-Lopez was attempting to steal a bike and chased his victim down the street carrying a knife. When officers arrived, he lunged at them with a knife above his head, forcing them to shoot.

But eyewitness testimony, some published for the first time by the Guardian, alongside forensic evidence produced by local attorneys working for Perez-Lopez’s impoverished family in Guatemala, have begun to tell a damningly different story: of a hard-working young man shot and killed while running away from the police.

“I’m in poor health, all these days have past since he left,” Perez-Lopez’s mother, Margarita Lopez, said in broken Spanish through tears on the phone from Chiquimula, south Guatemala. Just two months before he died, Amilcar had raised enough to pay for his family to have running water and electricity in their small, wooden home for the first time.

The neighbourhood block of 2800 Folsom Street, where Perez-Lopez lived in a small boiler room paying $300 a month in rent, remains in mourning and shock, hoping that his bloody death will not be one without meaning.



Two officers with a history of violence, one bike and the man who never got away

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A memorial for Amilcar Perez-Lopez near the site of the shooting in San Francisco. Photograph: Bryce Yukio Adolphson/The Guardian

“It was just like a split second. It was just so fast,” said “Maria”, sitting on the porch of her family home on Folsom Street, which overlooks the site where Perez-Lopez was gunned down outside his apartment.

Maria would not give her real name for publication, and has not spoken publicly before about what she saw. “A lot of people don’t want to say nothing. They’re afraid of the police,” she said.

It was around 9.45pm on 26 February, Maria told the Guardian, and Perez-Lopez was standing on the road “talking” with another man, later named as Abraham Perez, who was not from the Mission and who alleged Perez-Lopez had stolen his bike. By this point, according to police, a passerby who had left a nearby coffee shop had already made an emergency call. Two plain-clothed officers, identified as Eric Reboli and Craig Tiffe, arrived shortly after. Maria turned away.

Officers Tiffe and Reboli were themselves named in a 2009 civil lawsuit alleging police brutality. The claimant, a Latino man named David Magana, argued that four officers from the SFPD beat him “with their hands, fists, nightsticks” and “kicked him with their boots all over his body” after mistakenly identifying him as a suspect, according to legal documents obtained by the Guardian. The case was later dismissed.

By the the time she looked back again, only a few seconds later, the officers had their guns drawn. She could not see Perez-Lopez at this point, indicating there was some distance between police and the 20-year-old. Maria looked away: “I got scared, and that’s when it started. The shots.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Amilcar Perez-Lopez crime scene. Photograph: Supplied

According to the police account delivered by San Francisco police chief Greg Suhr at a town hall meeting three days after the shooting, Perez-Lopez was said to have lunged toward the officers with the knife overhead, having turned with a swiping motion before he was shot. Suhr was jeered by furious residents at the meeting as he read from a prepared speech.

I've always been surprised that the groundswell doesn't rise to the level that it does in other shootings.

But Perez-Lopez’s two roommates – both undocumented migrants – are reported to have witnessed the entire event. Both were uncontactable, but a short audio interview with one, conducted by a local advocacy group, described police jumping on Perez-Lopez from behind.

“He didn’t realize they were police. When they tried to grab him, he got away. They told him to drop the weapon. He dropped the weapon on the sidewalk. After that, they shot at him.”

Two people present at the time of the audio recording have verified its authenticity to the Guardian. The eyewitness is now in counselling, multiple neighbours and community advocates said.

‘Shot in cold blood’

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A private autopsy on Amilcar Perez-Lopez showed he was shot six times from behind, four times in the back, once to the head and once in the right arm Photograph: Arnoldo Casillas

A private autopsy commissioned by Perez-Lopez’s family attorney, and shared in full with the Guardian, supports the roommate’s account. It shows the 20-year-old was shot six times from behind, four times in the back, once to the head and once in the right arm, a further indication he was running away.

On Tuesday, the San Francisco medical examiner’s office told the Guardian it had carried out an official autopsy in March. A clerk at the medical examiner’s office said the case was still pending, with no cause of death yet attested to.

“For the immigrant community, there is always a serious fear of having contact with authorities,” said Arnoldo Casillas, lead attorney for the Perez-Lopez family. “Especially for eyewitnesses when they see somebody, like in Amilcar’s case, shot in cold blood. It drives them underground.”

But another element of the case continues to perplex the veteran civil rights attorney.

“I’ve always been surprised that when there are Latino deaths at the hands of police officers, that the groundswell of concern, of anger, of frustration doesn’t rise to the level that it does in some other shootings,” he said.

Just six days before Perez-Lopez was killed, Rubén García Villalpando, a 31-year-old Mexican national, was shot dead by police in Grapevine, Texas. He was unarmed and dashcam footage shows him advancing towards the officer who killed him with hands on his head after he is warned not to move. The father of four is shot dead off-camera; a grand jury later ruled the killing as a justified use of force.

Ten days before Villalpando’s death, Antonio Zambrano-Montes, an undocumented Mexican migrant in Pasco, Washington, was shot dead after three officers opened fire opened fire 17 times. The 35-year-old was unarmed but had been throwing rocks at traffic. The incident was caught on cellphone video and shows Zambrano-Montes running away from police before he is shot. The case is still being considered by the county attorney.

A month to the day before Perez-Lopez died, Jessica Hernandez, an unarmed 17-year-old, was shot dead by police in Denver. Police allege she failed to obey commands and drove a stolen vehicle towards an officer who opened fire, but an autopsy and witness accounts have contradicted this narrative.

Despite smatterings of national press, none of these three cases received sustained coverage.

A Guardian investigation has found that of the 67 Latino/Hispanic people killed by US police so far this year, a remarkable 25% have been unarmed, compared with 15% of white people.

“We’re not surprised by these numbers, and there is real recognition that the Latino experience with police has been underreported,” said Eric Rodriguez, vice-president of advocacy for the National Council of La Raza, the largest Hispanic civil rights group in the US.

“People tend to think that anything that to do with immigrants is related to immigration reform. They stop thinking about us otherwise. We have many immigrants living in our community that are living civically and being harassed by police all the time.”

Hundreds for rent, 14 calls to nowhere and one life cut short

For Latino organisers in San Francisco, the death of Perez-Lopez gave rise to just the latest allegations of abuse and racism by the city police. Two officers resigned last month and six are facing dismissal after a slew of racist text messages sent between officers were discovered by federal investigators.



Both officers involved in the Perez-Lopez shooting, Eric Reboli and Craig Tiffe, are already back on active duty. The San Francisco police department refused to comment on a detailed list of questions sent by the Guardian for this article, citing an “open investigation”. The San Francisco district attorney’s office, which is also investigating the death, had no comment.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Amilcar Perez-Lopez shown on his friend Roman’s cellphone. Photograph: Bryce Yukio Adolphson/The Guardian

Those in the Mission who knew Perez-Lopez are still coming to terms with his death. Everyone used to joke, for example, that Eduardo Roman was like Amilcar’s older brother. Not just for their nine-year age difference, but because Perez-Lopez, weighing only 131 pounds and standing just over five feet tall, looked like a boy.

Roman met Perez-Lopez two and a half years ago, after the then-17-year-old was released from an immigration detention centre in Arizona – he was detained for around four months – and came to San Francisco, a so-called “sanctuary city” where migrants enjoy greater legal protections. Perez-Lopez arrived in the city and could not speak a word of English nor much Spanish; he was fluent, instead, in an indigenous dialect from his village in the mountains surrounding the small city of Chiquimula in south-east Guatemala.

Roman said Perez-Lopez rarely spoke of his journey to the US, other than to say it was “really hard for him”.

“He left Guatemala with $200 in his pocket. He took the buses up to Mexico. He worked in Mexico for two months, and then he just kept his thought, ‘I’m going to get to the United States.’”

Perez-Lopez was homeless for his first weeks in San Francisco but soon met Roman, a Nicaraguan national, who helped get him a job at a local construction firm. The two spent almost every day together, working back-breaking shifts to install central heating systems around the city, and then taking more private construction jobs after they clocked off. They started early, at 5am, and worked six day weeks. On occasion they would complete 22-hour shifts.

He was paying $300 rent to live on a cot in a boiler room …How much more honorable could somebody be?

Kevin Born, the owner of Ashbury General Contracting and Engineering where Amilcar worked his day job remembers him as “a hard working, mild-mannered guy” who “never got into any confrontations”.

“He was paying $300 rent to live on a cot in a boiler room. He didn’t even have a bed,” said Born. “One of the things he was most excited about was he had just found a new room and he was going to be able to buy his brothers and sisters presents that he could keep safe. This is the kind of guy, this is where his motivations were. How much more honorable could somebody be?”

Neither Born nor Roman were present at the time Perez-Lopez was killed. But they said his actions as described by police were out of character and simply didn’t match his diminutive physical stature.

Born was asked by the local coroner to identify Amilcar’s body after finding a payslip in his pocket. “He [the coroner] was describing the person he had in the office, ‘he looks like a boy’. He did, he looked like a child. The idea that he was lunging just didn’t make sense.”

On the day after Perez-Lopez was killed, Roman arrived at his house to pick him up for work. He called him 14 times before realising something was wrong. He drove around the neighbourhood looking for his friend, again and again, until someone told him the news. He broke down in tears.

“I loved him like he was part of my family,” Roman said. “He was like my brother. My short brother.”