Woman says Luis Gongora appeared ‘relaxed’ and was ‘not posing a threat to anyone’ before officers shot and killed him

A key witness to the police shooting of a homeless man in San Francisco on Thursday has come forward to say that the man was “relaxed”, “isolated”, and not “posing a threat to anyone” before two police officers opened fire.

Christine Pepin, a 45-year-old resident of Sunnyvale, is the latest witness to challenge the police narrative that Luis Gongora was armed and dangerous.

Pepin can be seen in a surveillance video that captures a partial view of the shooting. The footage, obtained by the San Francisco Chronicle, shows a woman walking on the sidewalk across the street from where two police officers approached and shot Gongora. As the gunfire erupted, the woman ducked and ran down the sidewalk, away from the shooting.

“He was sitting on the ground, his back against the wall,” Pepin said about Gongora. “He seemed to be holding something in his left hand, but I didn’t see a knife. He didn’t seem aggressive. He seemed kind of lost and confused.

“His head was against the building, sitting down, and his knees were bent, like in a relaxed manner,” she added.

Pepin said that the officers were approximately seven to 10 meters from Gongora, and that no one else was close to him: “He was pretty much isolated. He was alone.”

She said she then saw an officer aim a “big black and orange” gun at Gongora, and heard the officer tell Gongora to stay on the ground.

“I was shocked by this because it seemed to me that the person was harmless,” Pepin said. “The officers started shooting, and I thought, ‘This must not be real ammunition,’ I thought, ‘because why would they do that?’”

Pepin started to run away, and her view was blocked by a parked car, so she did not see what happened next.

Like S Smith Patrick, another witness who has challenged the police narrative of the shooting, Pepin said that she had assumed Gongora had threatened the police officers in a separate incident. After watching the surveillance video, however, she said she realized that she had witnessed the beginning of the encounter.

“It didn’t seem that he was posing a threat to anyone. He looked lost. He didn’t look aggressive,” she said. “I don’t see how a man, even with a knife in his hands – which I didn’t see – how he could pose a threat to three officers with fully loaded weapons. That is really what shocked me.”

Pepin is the sixth witness to tell the Guardian that Gongora was not posing a threat.

The parade of eyewitness accounts – and the release of the surveillance video – appears to have prompted an unusually aggressive public relations effort by the embattled police department.

At a press conference on Friday, police commander Greg McEachern released information about four witness statements, all of which he said supported the idea that “as the officers contacted the individual, he moved forward to them with a knife in hand”.

But McEachern acknowledged that he was releasing just a selection of more than 10 witness statements the department has gathered, and that the department had not completed its interviews with the officers involved.

According to the commander, one witness saw Gongora “lunge at the officers”. A second said Gongora had been “flailing his hands with the knife as he ran toward the officers”. A third said “the knife was raised up as he ran toward the officers”.

The fourth witness McEachern cited was John Visor, a friend of Gongora’s who lived in the same homeless encampment in the Mission District and was the first to challenge the police narrative.

The commander said Visor told police that he “saw the suspect’s knife appear on the sidewalk”. But McEachern noted that Visor did not give police the same details he later gave reporters.

On Thursday, Visor told reporters: “He didn’t charge at the officers. He was going in circles because he didn’t understand what they said. He had a knife on him but he didn’t have it out. He had it on his hip, and when he hit the ground, that’s when it fell out.”

Stephanie Grant, another witness and Visor’s partner, agreed with his account, adding: “They didn’t wait for anything. It all happened so fast.”

Rosalyn Barnett, another resident of the homeless encampment, told the Guardian that she had been standing with Visor and Grant when the shooting took place but that the police had not taken a statement from her.

Barnett agreed that Gongora was sitting on the ground when police first approached, and said that the knife was sitting on the ground beside him.

“He was already sitting on the ground. He wasn’t touching the knife,” she said. “They start launching the beanbags. He’s sitting down the whole time. They didn’t tell him to put his hands on his head, behind his back, none of that.”

Barnett said that after Gongora was hit with beanbags, he stood up and tried to run away.

“He was running away. He wasn’t running toward them,” she said. “He wasn’t that kind of person.”

Two people who live in apartments across the street from the site of the shooting have also challenged the police account.

Patrick, who watched the entire incident from her apartment window, told the Guardian: “He didn’t get up until they were shooting. I would by no stretch of the imagination say that he was charging them. His body was recoiling from bullets.”

Another neighbor, who asked to remain anonymous, watched the incident from his kitchen window, and told the Guardian: “He was not really threatening. He wasn’t running at them with a knife or anything like that. They just jumped right out and 20 seconds later he was dead.”

If you have information about this shooting, please contact julia.wong@theguardian.com

