SAN FRANCISCO—A homeless man was shot and killed in the Mission District of San Francisco by Police Officers on the morning of Thursday, April 7.
Law enforcement arrived on the scene due to a call from a homeless outreach team describing a man with a knife on the 400 block of Shotwell.
Mission Local has reported that the Medical Examiner identified the victim as 45-year-old Luis Gongora.
After the shooting, Gongora was taken into surgery at San Francisco General Hospital, but died around 1:00 p.m., according to a hospital spokesperson.
Police Chief Greg Suhr said in a statement that officers responded to the scene at 10:01 a.m. Thursday morning. Two officers, one of them being a sergeant, went up the block on Shotwell Street where they encountered a man with a 10-to 12-inch-long kitchen knife.
He went on to say that bean-bag rounds were initially fired to stop the man, but the man got up and charged at the officers with the knife, which is when they proceeded to fire. Seven handgun casings were recovered at the scene. San Francisco Police Department Spokesman Albie Esparza added that four bean-bag rounds were fired before the seven handgun shots.
According to the report by Mission Local, two residents of the homeless encampment where Gongora stayed said that officers shot him while he was sitting down, unable to understand commands.
Stephanie Grant, another resident of the encampment, told Mission Local that Gongora was a monolingual Spanish speaker who did not speak a word of English.
In addition to these accounts, a user on NextDoor – the neighborhood network app – posted on Thursday that he witnessed the shooting and that the man was no threat.
The user wrote, “To be clear, the victim was on the ground the entire time, head down, visibly shaking. There was no visible aggressive behavior.”
No officers were injured during the incident according to SFPD Police Chief Greg Suhr.
