Man killed by SF police, officer identified

A man who was fatally shot by San Francisco police at a Subway sandwich shop on busy Market Street was identified Thursday by the city medical examiner’s office as a 26-year-old Texas native who had lost contact with friends back in that state.

Nicholas Flusche was killed Wednesday after two police officers confronted him as he stabbed another man — a Subway employee — at 11:22 a.m. on the 900 block of Market Street, officials said.

The officer who shot Flusche was identified by two sources as the same one who shot and wounded a man in the Oceanview district in January.

A body is transported to a medical examiner’s van after a police shooting on the 900 block of Market Street on Wednesday, May 3, 2017 in San Francisco, Calif. A body is transported to a medical examiner’s van after a police shooting on the 900 block of Market Street on Wednesday, May 3, 2017 in San Francisco, Calif. Image 1 of / 47 Caption Close Man killed by SF police, officer identified 1 / 47 Back to Gallery

Officer Kenneth Cha shot and killed Flusche, according to a lawyer representing the man shot in January and another person with knowledge of the matter.

Deputy Public Defender Brian Pearlman, citing his own police source, confirmed that Cha was the officer who shot and killed Flusche.

Pearlman added that during a Thursday court hearing for the victim in the January shooting, he told the judge that Cha also shot and killed Flusche.

Though Cha was previously assigned to the police department’s Taraval Station, he was transferred to the Tenderloin after the January shooting.

Flusche was pronounced dead at the scene Wednesday, said Police Chief Bill Scott. The stabbing victim, who was not identified, was taken to a hospital, where he was treated and released.

Police officials said they would hold a town hall in coming days to release more details. The shooting is under investigation by police, the district attorney’s office and the civilian Department of Police Accountability.

Though Flusche’s last residence is unknown, he graduated from Muenster High School in Muenster, Texas, in 2008. His family declined to speak at length about the incident.

“We are still kind of in shock,” said his father, Phillip Flusche.

Cade Archer, a 26-year-old Austin resident, said he lived with Flusche in 2011 when the two were students at Texas State University in San Marcos. At that time, he said, Flusche was an “amazing person, never confrontational, never angry.”

“He was always the person to go to for advice,” Archer said. “He got along with everyone and had so many friends.”

Flusche didn’t finish his studies, and he ended up working in sales for a surveillance company in San Antonio, Archer said. Flusche was fired from that job three years ago, according to a company manager who asked not to be identified.

He “fell off the grid” among his group of friends, Archer said. The two hadn’t spoken in about two years, and it wasn’t immediately clear how long Flusche had been in San Francisco.

A GoFundMe Web page was set up for the family to raise funeral costs and to transport Flusche’s body back to Texas.

Gumaro DeJesus, a 28-year-old manager at Shiekh Shoes, directly across the street from the Subway shop, said Thursday that he had been standing behind the cash register in his store Wednesday when he heard the pop of one gunshot.

He said detectives who came to Shiekh Shoes to check the store’s surveillance cameras said Subway employees had called police when Flusche began stabbing one of the workers. The sandwich shop was closed Thursday, with white paper covering windows.

DeJesus said he had seen the stabbing victim many times behind the counter preparing food.

Another witness, Kevin Ramsey, told KNTV that he had intervened after seeing Flusche behind the counter of the sandwich shop, stabbing a clerk who was covered in blood.

“I grabbed his arm and held it, and we fought for (the knife) till the cops came in the door to do what they had to,” Ramsey said. “The cops came in and told us all to get down.”

Ramsey said that because Flusche didn’t comply, he couldn’t follow the order to get down either.

“So I pushed him away from me and got out of the way,” he told the television station, “and he came after the cop, and the cop did what he had to do and shot one time.”

It was the city’s first fatal police shooting since Scott, a former Los Angeles deputy chief, took command in January.

The January shooting took place after a confrontation between Sean Moore and Cha and another officer that began with reports of a restraining-order violation. Video of the Moore shooting shows that a second officer tried to subdue the man with baton blows moments earlier but was knocked to the ground.

San Francisco Chronicle staff writers Michael Bodley and Vivian Ho contributed to this report.

Sarah Ravani is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: sravani@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SarRavani