A jury cleared the officers involved in the Nieto shooting after a highly publicized federal civil rights trial. With few notable exceptions, the investigation of Perez-Lopez\u2019s death was a whisper amid the roar of those calling for police reform.<\/span><\/p>\nBut over the past year, a small network of advocates, attorneys, investigators and neighbors have worked behind the scenes to facilitate a complex investigation involving witnesses fearful of retaliation from police and immigration authorities.<\/p>\n
Shifting Stories<\/b><\/p>\n
\u201cThe neighbors started gathering our own evidence and started doing our own investigation,\u201d said Florencia Rojo, a former neighbor of Perez-Lopez, who discovered the homicide scene when she tried to return home on Feb. 26, 2015, the night he was killed.<\/p>\n
Her house, just one door south from where Perez-Lopez lived, was blocked off by police, so she went around the corner and tried to climb into her neighbor\u2019s backyard.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s where she met one of the dead man\u2019s roommates, whose account of the shooting differs significantly from the multiple versions offered by Police Chief Greg Suhr.<\/p>\n
At a town hall meeting four days after the shooting, Suhr said that two officers responding to a 911 call about a man with a knife came upon Perez-Lopez and another man he was allegedly chasing on Folsom Street, between 24th and 25th streets. Perez-Lopez charged the officers from five feet away with the knife \u201craised overhead,\u201d according to Suhr. Also at the meeting, Mission Station Capt. Daniel Perea said the other man, later identified as Abraham Perez, told him the officers had saved his life.<\/p>\n
After an independent autopsy showed Perez Lopez was shot six times from behind, Suhr qualified his previous statements. During an appearance on KQED\u2019s Forum last July, the chief said Perez Lopez \u201ccame at the officers with the knife, and then the officers fired and he turned away, which would explain not all of the rounds going in the front.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAt the scene that night, the discussion was of Amilcar Lopez moving forward,\u201d Suhr clarified in February. \u201cLater on, in discussions with the officers, there was discussion that he turned to go after the man that he was originally pursuing with a knife.\u201d<\/p>\n
Officers Craig Tiffe and Eric Reboli, who fired the shots that night, have long since returned to duty. Perea said in a recent interview that both officers are still assigned to Mission Station. He declined to say whether Tiffe and Reboli had returned to the plainclothes unit, though, citing concerns for the safety of his officers.<\/p>\n
He said in the past year Mission Station\u2019s plainclothes unit added a supervisor, and it now consists of two supervising sergeants and 10 officers.<\/p>\n
SFPD\u2019s Attempted Interviews<\/b><\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the district attorney\u2019s investigators conducting their own investigation pursued a lead of the two roommates, who were rumored to have seen the shooting.<\/p>\n
\u201cI know what happened,\u201d one of the roommates said in a recent interview, speaking in Spanish and on condition of anonymity due to what he says is his fear of retaliation from police. \u201cI saw things happen really clearly.\u201d<\/p>\n
He says, for the same reason, that he and the other man were afraid to talk to Police Department investigators, and they made a pact not to do so without an attorney.<\/p>\n
That frustrated the Police Department\u2019s homicide investigation, according to declarations filed by three SFPD officers in a federal wrongful death civil case brought by Perez-Lopez\u2019s family in Guatemala. The officers wrote that the roommates changed their stories and evaded questions.<\/p>\n
Sgt. Anthony Ravano declared that he spoke with two roommates the night of the shooting, and that they stated they had not seen the shooting, but only heard gunshots.<\/p>\n
When Ravano and Lt. Daniel Dedet tried to follow up, one of the men said an attorney told them to say nothing, and the other reached by phone evaded questions, hung up, and didn\u2019t return a phone message.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn summary, both roommates have refused to cooperate with the SFPD investigation after speaking with civil attorneys for Mr. Perez-Lopez\u2019s family,\u201d Ravano wrote.<\/p>\n
Attempts to reach the man with the bike, Abraham Perez, were unsuccessful. Civil attorneys for Perez-Lopez\u2019s family say he told them in an interview that Perez-Lopez was simply running from the plainclothes officers when they started shooting, and he likely didn\u2019t know the men were police.<\/p>\n
DA Pursues Testimony<\/b><\/p>\n
Near the end of last year, District Attorney George Gasc\u00f3n started pushing for interviews with the roommates, according to Florencia Rojo and the Rev. Richard Smith. The district attorney\u2019s office declined to comment for this report, citing an open investigation.<\/p>\n
Smith said Gasc\u00f3n called him last fall.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe said \u2018This has the markings of a bad shooting and I absolutely have to get the eye witnesses in here and get their testimony,\u2019\u201d Smith said, adding that Gasc\u00f3n said he could arrest the witnesses, but he\u2019d prefer them to speak voluntarily. \u201cHe said \u2018I have to have these eyewitnesses in order to make a case.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Rojo said she got a similar phone call from Gasc\u00f3n. She, Smith and others worked to help the men overcome fears of immigration enforcement and the trauma of seeing their friend shot dead by police.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was a lot of fear and a lot of hesitation,\u201d Rojo said. \u201cWhen your trust in the police and law enforcement and the people who are supposed to protect you and keep you safe is broken, speaking out is very scary.\u201d<\/p>\n
Advocates Scramble<\/b><\/p>\n
A network including Smith and Rojo worked to secure an immigration attorney for the men, who are both undocumented. The attorney, Laura Sanchez, said she is in the early stages of pursuing a special visa for witnesses or victims of violent crime. Their visa petition, however, involves a crime unrelated to the Perez-Lopez shooting, she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think finding representation made them feel a lot more comfortable and secure talking openly about what they had seen,\u201d Sanchez said. Generally speaking, she said people in the U.S. unlawfully \u201care afraid to come forward because they fear some authority will let immigration know of their whereabouts.\u201d<\/p>\n
The stress weighed heavily on the roommate who spoke recently for this report. He said he\u2019s often had trouble sleeping.<\/p>\n
\u201cI felt the need to talk because I felt like I was dying inside,\u201d he said in Spanish. \u201cI was feeling terrible because I felt like justice wasn\u2019t being done. I\u2019m not well psychologically. It\u2019s hard when you see somebody who you love get killed.\u201d<\/p>\n
On Dec. 7, Rojo accompanied the man to a dinner meeting with Elvira and Refugio Nieto, the parents of Alejandro Nieto, who was shot and killed by San Francisco police officers in 2014.<\/p>\n
The Nietos explained the process their son\u2019s case had followed, and they encouraged the roommate to come forward, they said in an interview on April 25.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s when I told him not to worry and not to be afraid,\u201d Elvira Nieto said in Spanish. \u201cYou could see he was in despair and by his way of speaking, you could tell he was very nervous. But he talked about how they shot him in the back.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Nietos said they told Perez-Lopez\u2019s roommate that if more witnesses had come forward in their son\u2019s case, and earlier, perhaps they would have seen a different result. Gasc\u00f3n cleared the officers who shot Alejandro Nieto of criminal wrongdoing in early 2015.<\/p>\n
The district attorney found that four officers who fired a combined 59 gunshots at Nieto reasonably believed the object he carried and allegedly pointed at them was a firearm. The officers discovered after fatally shooting Nieto that he had a Taser stun gun.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf they treat this case the same way they treated Alejandro\u2019s, the same thing will happen,\u201d Refugio Nieto said. He said his son\u2019s case shows an unfair bias in favor of police officers in both the criminal and civil systems. \u201cAlejandro, he is gone, but now we\u2019re a symbol of the community, to help others and understand the upcoming process. Amilcar\u2019s case is the one that is next.\u201d<\/p>\n
Statements at the Church<\/b><\/p>\n
About a week later, the advocates brokered a meeting between Perez-Lopez\u2019s former roommates and investigators from the district attorney\u2019s office in Richard Smith\u2019s church. Florencia Rojo sat in on the four-hour interview with the men she\u2019s tried to support since the shooting.<\/p>\n
One of them recounted the night Perez-Lopez was killed in an interview on April 28.<\/p>\n
He said he ran outside after another roommate told him Perez-Lopez had come into the flat and grabbed a knife.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wanted to stop any kind of trouble Amilcar was going to get himself in,\u201d he said. \u201cWe saw him walking toward us calmly.\u201d<\/p>\n
The former roommate was about two doors north of Perez-Lopez, standing at the edge of his house\u2019s entry and the sidewalk, when he saw two larger figures emerge from the darkness behind his friend.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne of them tried to grab him from behind, without saying anything,\u201d he said, \u201cwithout telling him anything.\u201d<\/p>\n
But Perez-Lopez squirmed free and ran toward the street, between two parked cars.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey said, \u2018Drop the weapon,\u2019\u201d then both officers fired almost immediately, the man said. \u201cI don\u2019t know if he even got a chance to drop it, but when the first shot was fired, he dropped the knife. I heard the shot, and when I saw that, I felt my legs go weak.\u201d<\/p>\n
Perez Lopez was running into an empty street, the roommate said, neither a threat to officers nor anyone else.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey didn\u2019t even talk to him,\u201d he said. \u201cThey just shot him.\u201d<\/p>\n
The roommates\u2019 statements prompted investigators from the district attorney\u2019s office to descend back onto Folsom Street in late December, according to Smith and others in the neighborhood, interviewing dozens more people. Since then, the small community of former friends, family and their advocates have been awaiting for Gasc\u00f3n\u2019s decision.<\/p>\n
Suhr has pledged to effectively end uses of deadly force against people with weapons other than a firearm, and the department continues to expand de-escalation and antibias training.<\/p>\n
But even as the department makes those moves, it\u2019s confronted by fresh controversies. On April 7, two officers shot and killed Luis Gongora, another Spanish-speaking man allegedly wielding a knife, in the Mission District. As in the Amilcar Perez-Lopez case, some witnesses have contradicted the police account of the incident, which the department says occurred after Gongora lunged at officers.<\/p>\n
Alexis Terrazas is editor-in-chief of <\/i>El Tecolote<\/span>. Alex Emslie and Nicole Reinert are reporters for KQED News.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"[su_heading size=”30″ align=”left”]Eyewitness refutes SFPD explanation of Amilcar shooting[\/su_heading] Editor\u2019s Note: This report was produced in collaboration with KQED. [su_slider source=”media: 30125,30129,30127,30128,30130,30132,30126,30131″ limit=”40″ link=”image” target=”blank” width=”700″ height=”460″ autoplay=”0″ speed=”500″][su_slider source=”media: 29856,29857″ limit=”30″ link=”image” target=”blank” width=”700″ height=”460″ autoplay=”0″ speed=”500″][su_menu][\/su_slider] In the 14 months since two plainclothes police officers shot and killed a 20-year-old Guatemalan immigrant carpenter […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35,"featured_media":30125,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"newspack_popups_has_disabled_popups":false,"newspack_featured_image_position":"","newspack_post_subtitle":"","newspack_article_summary_title":"Overview:","newspack_article_summary":"","newspack_hide_updated_date":false,"newspack_show_updated_date":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3929],"tags":[9551,4659,4245,9549,4787,8595,9545,4789,9547,6161,3589,4791,9561,9559,9557,9441,7511,3925,9541,9553,8739,9543,7797,3593,9555],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-30124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-en","tag-abraham-perez","tag-alejandro-nieto-en","tag-amilcar-perez-lopez","tag-capt-daniel-perea","tag-craig-tiffe-en","tag-elvira-nieto-en","tag-episcopal-church-of-st-john-the-evangelist","tag-eric-reboli-en","tag-florencia-rojo","tag-george-gascon-en","tag-greg-suhr-en","tag-guatemala-en","tag-kqed-en","tag-laura-sanchez","tag-lt-daniel-dedet","tag-luis-gongora","tag-mario-woods-en","tag-mission-district-en","tag-mission-station","tag-plainclothes-unit","tag-refugio-nieto-en","tag-rev-richard-smith","tag-san-francisco-district-attorney","tag-sfpd-en","tag-sgt-anthony-ravano","entry"],"yoast_head":"\n
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