San Francisco police chief addresses public over fatal shooting of Luis Gongora but fails to placate anger as thousands call for prosecution of officers

San Francisco police chief Greg Suhr told a crowd of angry community members that the officers who shot and killed a homeless man last week told investigators they feared he “was going to kill one of them or harm them with the weapon” before opening fire.

San Francisco police department (SFPD) policy allows officers to use lethal force if they have “reasonable cause to believe” that they or other people are in “imminent danger of death or serious bodily injury”.

Suhr’s statement at a “town hall” meeting is the latest attempt by the embattled police chief to explain how Luis Gongora, a 45-year-old man who lived in a tent on the street where he was killed, ended up fatally wounded within 30 seconds of three police officers arriving at the encampment.

Police brutality and homelessness collide in aftermath of San Francisco killing Read more

The new information on the shooting did not appease the crowd, which broke out into chants of “Fire chief Suhr”. The shooting has prompted outrage and heartbreak among friends and neighbors of Gongora – who describe him as harmless and non-violent – and among San Franciscans who see the shooting as just the latest assault on the homeless and poor by a city that is increasingly unaffordable to all but the wealthy.

More than 10,000 people have signed an online petition calling for the officers to be prosecuted for Gongora’s killing.

Suhr said that the incident began when two homeless outreach workers responded to a complaint that a baby was crying in the homeless encampment. The workers did not find a baby, but they observed Gongora “forcefully kicking a basketball off parked cars”, Suhr said.

Neighbors and friends say that Gongora spent much of his days kicking a soccer ball on the street, usually against a wall.

As they were preparing to leave, Suhr said, the workers again saw Gongora carrying a knife that he was “swinging indiscriminately as he walked down the street”. The workers said that he appeared to be in an “altered mental state”.

At that point, the outreach workers decided to call the police. The workers are employed by the city’s department of public health, which is not releasing their names. One of the workers told police that this was only the fifth time she has called the police in 10 years, Suhr said. The department of emergency management has declined to release the audio of the 911 call, citing the ongoing investigation.

Suhr said that when police officers arrived minutes later, they saw Gongora “seated on the sidewalk with a large knife and the blade pointed up”.

After giving verbal orders in English and Spanish, Suhr said that Gongora “briefly put the knife down then quickly picked it up”. The officers then deployed four beanbag rounds.

“At that time, he stood up and ran at one of the officers with the knife in his hand,” Suhr said. The officers fired seven 40 caliber rounds. Suhr said preliminary medical report says that Gongora was struck six times.



Asked why police officers would deploy beanbag rounds at a man who was sitting down, Surh replied: “They tried to shoot him in the arm to get him to drop the knife.”

One of the officers who fired was a sergeant who has worked for SFPD for 17 years – the second has 13 years’ experience in law enforcement, four with SFPD. Both were white. A third officer, a Spanish speaker, arrived at the scene after the first two and did not open fire.

In interviews with the Guardian, six witnesses to the shooting have challenged Suhr’s claim that Gongora “charged” at the officers.



They include three homeless residents of the same encampment who were standing on the same side of the street as Gongora, two neighbors who saw the incident from their apartment windows across the street, and one woman who was walking on the sidewalk across the street.



On the Friday after the shooting, police commander Greg McEachern released excerpts of statements from four witnesses. Of those, three agreed that Gongora had moved toward the police officers before the shooting, the police chief said.

At the meeting, Suhr presented excerpts from the statements of 12 eyewitnesses, including the two homeless outreach workers and 10 others.

The selective release of information drew the ire of city supervisor David Campos, who attended the town hall.

“You have an ongoing investigation supposedly to find out what happened in this incident, and yet you’ve had a number of press conferences where you are already prejudging what happened,” he said. “I ask the police commission and the mayor to direct the police department to stop trying the case in the public.”

Details emerge about Gongora’s life

Among the speakers at the town hall meeting was Matthew Castro, 40, who broke down in tears as he recalled Gongora.

Castro said that he met Gongora at work in 2003, when Gongora was a prep cook at Mel’s Drive-In, a diner in San Francisco.

“He didn’t have a hostile bone in his body,” Castro said. “He was 130lb. He was so docile. We was my best friend for about a decade.”

According to Castro, Gongora has a wife and three children living in Teabo, Mexico, his hometown, and two brothers and a cousin living in San Francisco.

Castro said Gongora, who he did not believe had any history of mental illness, was evicted from his apartment in 2012 and ended up on the streets.

“I was trying to convince him to go back to Mexico,” he added. “I would love to see justice, but that just doesn’t seem to happen in this country for brown and black people.”