Crowd demands answers at meeting after S.F. police shooting

(03-25) 23:08 PDT San Francisco -- Police shot and killed a 28-year-old City College of San Francisco student in San Francisco's Bernal Heights Park when they mistook his black Taser pistol for a gun, San Francisco police Chief Greg Suhr said Tuesday.

But what police did to Alejandro Nieto that night, according to his friends and family, was an unjustified overreaction - and nothing short of murder.

Suhr addressed a packed room of community members at Leonard Flynn Elementary School Tuesday night, addressing Nieto's death for the first time since the Friday shooting on Bernal Hill.

His account of the shooting described a confusing and fluid situation in which officers responding to reports of a man with a gun fired upon Nieto when he reached for the Taser in his holster.

The first call, at about 7:10 p.m., reported that the man with the gun was pacing on the north slope of the hill, Suhr said. Another said he had his hand on his holster as he ate chips.

Officers approached Nieto with that information, "triangulating" around him as is protocol with armed suspects, Suhr said.

They asked him to show his hands, but instead he pulled out his Taser, which automatically displayed a red target laser similar to what is displayed by guns. The officers opened fire.

"They believed he had a firearm," Suhr said. "They fired in defense of their lives."

But friends say Suhr's account of that night doesn't answer why witnesses reported hearing up to 16 shots that could only have been fired by the police. His account, they said, doesn't answer why officers could not differentiate between a gun and Nieto's Taser, which had a distinctive yellow stripe on the side.

Nieto carried a Taser as part of his job as a nightclub security guard, his friends said. The practicing Buddhist who advocated for peace and volunteered at youth community centers had stopped to enjoy a burrito on Bernal Hill before his shift began that night.

Possessing stun guns is legal in California for everyone except convicted felons, drug addicts and people who have misused the devices in the past. Tasers like the one Nieto had shoot two wire probes that deliver an electrical charge, and can reach at most only 15 feet.

The officers shot Nieto from about 75 feet away, Suhr said. He said he did not know how many times Nieto was shot, but that it was multiple times. Benjamin Bac Sierra, Nieto's friend and former English professor, said Nieto's loved ones believed it was 14 times.

"This is a travesty," he said. "He was not bothering anyone. There is no justification whatsoever - whatsoever - for him to be massacred with 14 bullet holes."

His behavior had originally been described as erratic by witnesses, who noted him air-boxing and pointing his Taser at a dog. His supporters decried such reports at the meeting.

"When did it become erratic to eat a lunch at sunset on the hill?" asked his friend Adriana Camarena. "Even the calls - they weren't for a man threatening anyone. Why was he treated as a threat?"

Some of his friends previously said that Nieto was depressed and hadn't been acting like himself lately. A former friend had filed a restraining order against him a few weeks prior for allegedly using his Taser on him four times in front of his wife and son.

But his supporters at the meeting said police were using Nieto's mental health as a way to smear his memory and justify their actions. They said the man who filed the restraining order had actually assaulted Nieto before and that Nieto had also been seeking a restraining order against him.

Suhr did not bring up Nieto's mental health except to say that he could not own a gun "for mental health reasons," and that one mention of mental health was enough to outrage the crowd.

Roberto Hernandez, a Mission District community organizer, spoke to the crowd to point out that even if Nieto's mental health was in question, it still did not justify multiple officers shooting at him multiple times. He spoke of his own mental health issues, and how when he was a young man living in the Mission, he and his friends would run up Bernal Hill when their problems became too much and yell and scream their frustration away.

"It hurts that the first thing to come out was that he had mental health problems," Hernandez said. "If that would have been me up on the hill, screaming and yelling, you would have gotten a lot more calls than that."

The police officers who shot Nieto have been placed on paid administrative leave.

Police said the usual protocols following officer-involved shootings will proceed, with internal investigations and a probe by the district attorney's office and the Office of Citizen Complaints. Neighborhood advocates and friends of Nieto's are calling for an external investigation into the shooting.