DEATH BY GENTRIFICATION:THE KILLING OF ALEX NIETO AND THE SAVAGING OF SAN FRANCISCO

Rebecca Solnit

ON WHAT WOULD have been his thirtieth birthday, Alejandro Nieto’s parents left a packed courtroom in San Francisco shortly before pictures from their son’s autopsy were shown to a jury. The photographs showed what happens when fourteen bullets rip through a person’s head and body. Refugio and Elvira Nieto spent much of the rest of the day sitting on a bench in the windowless hall of the federal building where their civil lawsuit for their son’s wrongful death was being heard.

Alex Nieto was twenty-eight years old when he was killed in the neighborhood where he had spent his whole life. He died in a barrage of bullets fired at him by four San Francisco policemen. There are a few things about his death that everyone agrees on: he was in a hilltop park eating a burrito and tortilla chips, wearing the Taser he owned for his job as a licensed security guard at a nightclub, when someone called 911 on him a little after seven p.m. on the evening of March 21, 2014. The police officers who arrived a few minutes later claim that Nieto defiantly pointed the Taser at them, and that they mistook its red laser light for the laser sights of a gun, and shot him in self-defense. However, the stories of the four officers contradict one another’s and some of the evidence.

On the road that curves around the green hilltop of Bernal Heights Park is an unofficial memorial to Nieto. People walking dogs or running or taking a stroll stop to read the banner, which is pinned by stones to the slope of the hill and surrounded by fresh and artificial flowers. Alex’s father, Refugio, still visits the memorial at least once a day, walking up from his small apartment on the south side of Bernal Hill. Alex Nieto had been visiting the hilltop since he was a child: that evening his parents, joined by friends and supporters, went up there in the dark to bring a birthday cake to the memorial.

Refugio and Elvira Nieto are dignified, modest people, straight-backed but careworn, who speak eloquently in Spanish and hardly at all in English. They had known each other as poor children in a little town in the state of Guanajuato in central Mexico and emigrated separately to the Bay Area in the 1970s. There, they met again and married in 1984. They have lived in the same building on the south slope of Bernal Hill ever since. She worked for decades as a housekeeper in San Francisco’s downtown hotels and is now retired. He had worked on the side, but mostly stayed at home as the principal caregiver of Alex and his younger brother, Hector.

In the courtroom, Hector, handsome, somber, with glossy black hair pulled back neatly, sat with his parents most days, not far from the three white and one Asian policemen who killed his brother. That there was a trial at all was a triumph. The city had withheld from family and supporters the full autopsy report and the names of the officers who shot Nieto, and it was months before the key witness overcame his fear of the police to come forward.

Nieto died because a series of white men saw him as a menacing intruder in the place he had spent his whole life. Some of them thought he was possibly a gang member because he was wearing a red jacket. Many Latino boys and men in San Francisco avoid wearing red and blue because they are the colors of two gangs, the Norteños and Sureños—but the colors of San Francisco’s football team, the 49ers, are red and gold. Wearing a 49ers jacket in San Francisco is as ordinary as wearing a Saints jersey in New Orleans. That evening, Nieto, who had thick black eyebrows and a closely cropped goatee, was wearing a new-looking 49ers jacket, a black 49ers cap, a white T-shirt, black trousers, and carried the Taser in a holster on his belt, under his jacket. (A Taser shoots out wires that deliver an electrical shock, briefly paralyzing its target; it is shaped roughly like a gun, but more bulbous; Nieto’s had bright yellow markings over much of its surface and a fifteen-foot range.)

Nieto had first been licensed by the state as a security guard in 2007 and had worked in that field since. He had never been arrested and had no police record, an achievement in a neighborhood where Latino kids can get picked up just for hanging out in public. He was a Buddhist: a Latino son of immigrants who practiced Buddhism is the kind of hybrid San Francisco used to be good at. As a teen he had worked as a youth counselor for almost five years at the Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center; he was gregarious and community spirited, a participant in political campaigns, street fairs, and community events.

He had graduated from community college with a focus on criminal justice, and hoped to help young people as a probation officer. He had an internship with the city’s juvenile probation department not long before his death, according to former city probation officer Carlos Gonzalez, who became a friend. Gonzalez said Nieto knew how criminal justice worked in the city. No one has ever provided a convincing motive for why he would point a gun-shaped object at the police when he understood that it would probably be a fatal act.

Like a rape victim, the dead young man underwent character assassination as irrelevant but unflattering things were dredged up about his past and publicized. Immediately after his death, the police and coroner’s office dug into his medical records and found that he’d had a mental health crisis years before. They blew that up into a story that he was mentally ill and made that an explanation for what happened. It ran like this: Why did they shoot Nieto? Because he pointed his Taser at them and they thought it was a gun. Why did he point his Taser at them? Because he was mentally ill. Why should we believe he was mentally ill? Because he pointed his Taser at them. It’s a circular logic that leads somewhere only if your trust in the San Francisco Police Department is great.

Nieto carried a Taser for his guard job at the El Toro Night Club, whose owner, Jorge del Rio, speaks of him as a calm and peaceful person he liked, trusted, admired, and still cares about: “He was very calm, a very calm guy. So I was very surprised to hear that they claim that he pulled a Taser on the police. Never have seen him react aggressively to anyone. He was the guy who would want to help others. I just can’t believe they’re saying this about him.” He told me how peaceful Nieto was, how brilliant at defusing potentially volatile situations, drawing drunk men out of the rowdy dance club with a Spanish-speaking clientele to tell them on the street “tonight’s not your night” and send them home feeling liked and respected.

From the beginning the police were hoping that Alex Nieto’s mental health records would somehow exonerate them. The justification that he was mentally ill got around, and it got some traction in local publications committed to justifying the police. But it was ruled inadmissible evidence by the judge in the civil suit brought by his parents, Refugio and Elvira Nieto. The medical records said that three years earlier Alex Nieto had some sort of breakdown and was treated for it. Various terms were thrown around—psychosis, paranoid schizophrenia—but the entire file was from 2011 and there seemed to be no major precedents or subsequent episodes of note. The theory that mental illness is relevant presumes not only that he was mentally ill on March 21, 2014, but that mental illness caused him to point a Taser at the police. If you don’t believe he pointed a Taser at the police, then mental illness doesn’t supply any clues to what happened. Did he? The only outside witness to the shooting says he did not.

Here’s the backstory as I heard it from a family friend: Devastated by a breakup, Alex got very dramatic about it one day, burned some love letters, and was otherwise over the top in the tiny apartment the four Nietos shared. His exasperated family called a city hotline for help in de-escalating, but instead got escalation: Nieto was seized and institutionalized against his will. The official record described burning the letters as burning a book or trying to burn down the house—something might have gotten lost in translation from Spanish. That was in early 2011; there was another incident later that year. In 2012, 2013, and until his death in 2014 there appear to have been no problems. There is no reason to believe that, even if what transpired in 2011 should be classified as mental illness, he suddenly relapsed on the evening of his death, after years of being exceptionally calm in the chaos of his nightclub job. And shortly before his encounter with the police, he exercised restraint in a confrontation with an aggressor.

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On the evening of March 21, 2014, Evan Snow, a thirtysomething “user experience design professional,” according to his LinkedIn profile, who had moved to the neighborhood about six months earlier (and who has since departed for a more suburban location), took his young Siberian husky for a walk on Bernal Hill. As Snow was leaving the park, Nieto was coming up one of the little dirt trails that leads to the park’s ring road, eating chips. In a deposition prior to the trial, Snow said that with his knowledge of the attire of gang members, he “put Nieto in that category of people that I would not mess around with.”

His dog put Nieto in the category of people carrying food, and went after him. Snow never seemed to recognize that his out-of-control dog was the aggressor: “So Luna was, I think, looking to move around the benches or behind me to run up happily to get a chip from Mr. Nieto. Mr. Nieto became further—what’s the right word?—distressed, moving very quickly and rapidly left to right, trying to keep his chips away from Luna. He ran down to these benches and jumped up on the benches, my dog following. She was at that point vocalizing, barking, or kind of howling.” The dog had Nieto cornered on the bench while its inattentive owner was forty feet away—in his deposition for the case, under oath, his exact words were that he was distracted by a female “jogger’s butt.” Snow said, “I can imagine that somebody would—could assume the dog was being aggressive at that point.” The dog did not come when he called, but kept barking.

Nieto, Snow says, then pulled back his jacket and took his Taser out, briefly pointing at the distant dog owner before he pointed it at the dog baying at his feet. The two men yelled at each other, and Snow apparently used a racial slur, but would not later give the precise word. As he left the park, he texted a friend about the incident. His text, according to his testimony, said, “in another state, like Florida, I would have been justified in shooting Mr. Nieto that night”—a reference to that state’s infamous “stand your ground” law, which removes the obligation to retreat before using force in self-defense. In other words, he apparently wished he could have done what George Zimmerman did to Trayvon Martin: execute him without consequences.

Soon after, a couple out walking their dogs passed by Nieto. Tim Isgitt, a recent arrival in the area, is the communications director of a nonprofit organization founded by tech billionaires. He now lives in suburban Marin County, as does his husband, Justin Fritz, a self-described “e-mail marketing manager” who had lived in San Francisco about a year. In a picture one of them posted on social media, they are chestnut-haired, clean-cut white men posing with their dogs, a springer spaniel and an old bulldog. They were walking those dogs when they passed Nieto at a distance.

Fritz did not notice anything unusual but Isgitt saw Nieto moving “nervously” and putting his hand on the Taser in its holster. Snow was gone, so Isgitt had no idea that Nieto had just had an ugly altercation and had reason to be disturbed. Isgitt began telling people he encountered to avoid the area. (One witness who did see Nieto shortly after Isgitt and Fritz, longtime Bernal Heights resident Robin Bullard, who was walking his own dog in the park, testified that there was nothing alarming about him. “He was just sitting there,” Bullard said.)

At the trial, Fritz testified that he had not seen anything alarming about Nieto. He said that he called 911 because Isgitt urged him to. At about 7:11 p.m. he began talking to the 911 dispatcher, telling her that there was a man with a black handgun. What race, asked the dispatcher, “Black, Hispanic?” “Hispanic,” replied Fritz. Later, the dispatcher asked him if the man in question was doing “anything violent,” and Fritz answered, “Just pacing, it looks like he might be eating chips or sunflowers, but he’s resting a hand kind of on the gun.” Alex Nieto had about five more minutes to live.

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San Francisco, like all cities, has been a place where when newcomers arrive in a trickle, they integrate and contribute to the ongoing transformation of a place that is not static in demographics and industries. When they arrive in a flood, as they have during economic booms since the nineteenth-century gold rush, including the dot-com surge of the late 1990s and the current tech tsunami, they scour out what was there before. By 2012 the incursion of tech workers had gone from steady stream to deluge, and more and more people and institutions—bookstores, churches, social services, nonprofits of all kinds, gay and lesbian bars, small businesses with deep roots in the neighborhoods—began to be evicted. So did seniors, including many in their nineties, schoolteachers, working-class families, the disabled, and pretty much anyone who was a tenant whose home could be milked for more money.

San Francisco had been a place where some people came out of idealism or stayed to realize an ideal: to work for social justice or teach the disabled, to write poetry or practice alternative medicine—to be part of something larger than themselves that was not a corporation, to live for something more than money. That was becoming less and less possible as rent and sale prices for homes spiraled upward. What the old-timers were afraid of losing, many of the newcomers seemed unable to recognize. The tech culture seemed in small and large ways to be a culture of disconnection and withdrawal.

And it was very white, male, and young, which is why I started to call my hometown “Fratistan.” As of 2014, Google’s Silicon Valley employees, for example, were 2 percent black, 3 percent Latino, and 70 percent male. The Google bus—the private luxury shuttles—made it convenient for these employees who worked in the South Bay to live in San Francisco, as did shuttles for Facebook, Apple, Yahoo!, and other big corporations. Airbnb, headquartered in San Francisco, became the engine that devoured long-term housing stock in rural and urban places around the world, turning it into space for transients. Uber, also based here, set about undermining taxi companies that paid a living wage. Another tech company housed here, Twitter, became the most efficient way to deliver rape and death threats to outspoken feminists. San Francisco, once a utopia in the eyes of many, became the nerve center of a new dystopia.

Tech companies created multimillionaires and billionaires whose influence warped local politics, pushing for policies that served the new industry and their employees at the expense of the rest of the population. None of the money sloshing around the city trickled down to preserve the center for homeless youth that closed in 2013, or the oldest black-owned, black-focused bookstore in the country, which closed in 2014, or San Francisco’s last lesbian bar, which folded in 2015, or the Latino drag and trans bar that closed the year before. As the Nieto trial unfolded, the uniquely San Franciscan African Orthodox Church of St. John Coltrane faced eviction from the home it found after an earlier eviction during the late-1990s dot-com boom. Resentments rose. And cultures clashed.

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At 7:12 p.m. on the evening of March 21, 2014, the police dispatcher who had spoken to Fritz put out a call. Some police officers began establishing a periphery, a standard way to de-escalate a potentially dangerous situation. One police car shot through the periphery to create a confrontation. In it were Lieutenant Jason Sawyer and Officer Richard Schiff, a rookie who had been on the job for less than three months. They headed for Bernal Heights Park when they got the call, tried first to enter it in their patrol car from the south side, the side where Alex’s parents lived, then turned around and drove in from the north side, going around the barrier that keeps vehicles out and heading up the road that is often full of runners, walkers, and dogs at that time of day. They moved rapidly, but without lights or sirens; they were not heading into an emergency. But they were rushing past their fellow officers and the periphery without coordinating a plan.

At 7:17:40 p.m., Alejandro Nieto came walking downhill around a bend in the road, according to the 911 operator’s conversation with Fritz. At 7:18:08 p.m., another policeman in the park, but not at the scene, broadcast: “Got a guy in a red shirt coming toward you.” Schiff testified in court, “Red could be related to a gang involvement. Red is a Norteño color.” Schiff testified that from about ninety feet away he shouted, “Show me your hands,” and that Nieto had replied, “No, show me your hands,” then drew his Taser, assuming a fighting stance, holding the weapon in both hands pointed at the police. The officers claim that the Taser projected a red light, which they assumed was the laser sight of a handgun, and feared for their lives. At 7:18:43 p.m., Schiff and Sawyer began barraging Nieto with .40-caliber bullets.

At 7:18:55 p.m., Schiff shouted, “Red,” a police code word for out of ammunition. He had emptied a whole clip at Nieto. He reloaded, and began shooting again, firing twenty-three bullets in all. Sawyer was also blazing away. He fired twenty bullets. Their aim appears to have been sloppy, because Fritz, who had taken refuge in a grove of eucalyptus trees below the road, can be heard shouting, “Help! Help!” on his call to the 911 operator, as bullets fired by the police were “hitting the trees above me, breaking things and just coming at me.” Sawyer said: “Once I realized there was no reaction, none at all, after being shot, I picked up my sights and aimed for the head.” Nieto was hit just above the lip by a bullet that shattered his right upper jaw and teeth. Another ripped through both bones of his lower right leg. Though the officers testify that he remained facing them, that latter bullet went in the side of his leg, as though he had turned away. That while so agonizingly injured he remained focused on pretending to menace the police with a useless device that drew fire to him is hard to believe.

Two more officers, Roger Morse and Nate Chew, drove up to the first patrol car, got out, and drew their guns. There were no plan, no communications, no strategy to contain the person they were pursuing or capture him alive if he proved to be a menace, to avoid a potentially dangerous confrontation in a popular park where bystanders could be hit. Morse testified in court: “When I first arrived I saw what appeared to be muzzle flash. I aimed at him and began shooting.” Tasers produce nothing that resembles muzzle flash. Chew, in contrast to his partner officer’s account, testified that Nieto was already on the ground when they arrived. He fired five shots at the man on the ground. He told the court he stopped when he “saw the suspect’s head fall down to the pavement.”

Several more bullets hit Nieto while he was on the ground—at least fourteen struck him, according to the city autopsy report. Only one out of four of the bullets the officers fired reached their target—they fired fifty-nine in all. They were shooting to kill, and to overkill. One went into his left temple and tore through his head toward his neck. Several hit him in the back, chest, and shoulders. One more went into the small of his back, severing his spinal cord.

The officers approached Nieto at 7:19:20 p.m., less than two minutes after it had all begun. Morse was the first to get there; he says that Nieto’s eyes were open and that he was gasping and gurgling. He says that he kicked the Taser out of the dying man’s hands. Schiff says he “handcuffed him, rolled him over, and said, ‘Sarge, he’s got a pulse.’” By the time the ambulance arrived, Alejandro Nieto was dead.

Nieto’s funeral, on April 1, 2014, packed the little church in Bernal Heights that his mother had taken him to as a child. I went with my friend Adriana Camarena, a civic-minded lawyer from Mexico City who lives in the Mission District, the neighborhood on Bernal’s north flank that has been a capital of Latino culture since the 1960s. She had met Alex briefly; I never had. We sat near a trio of African American women who had lost their own sons in police killings and routinely attend the funerals of other such victims. In the months that followed, Adriana became close to Refugio and Elvira Nieto. Their son had been their ambassador to the English-speaking world, and gradually Adriana was drawn into their grief and their need. She stepped in as an interpreter, advocate, counsel, and friend. Benjamin Bac Sierra, a novelist and former marine who teaches writing at San Francisco’s community college, was a devoted friend of and mentor to Alex. He has become the other leader of a small coalition named Justice for Alex Nieto.

In that springtime of Nieto’s death, I had begun to believe that what was tearing my city apart was not only a conflict pitting long-term tenants against affluent newcomers and the landlords, estate agents, house flippers, and developers seeking to open up room for them by shoving everyone else out. It was a conflict between two different visions of the city.

What I felt strongly at the funeral was the vital force of real community: people who experienced where they lived as a fabric woven from memory, ritual and habit, affection and love. This was a measure of place that had nothing to do with money and ownership and everything to do with connection. Adriana and I turned around in our pew and met Oscar Salinas, a big man born and raised in the Mission. He told us that when someone in the community is hurt, the Mission comes together. “We take care of each other.” To him, the Mission meant the people who shared Latino identity and a commitment to a set of values, and to one another, all held together by place. It was a beautiful vision that many shared.

The sense of community people were trying to hang on to was about the things that money cannot buy. It was about home as a whole neighborhood and the neighbors in it, not just the real estate you held title to or paid rent on. It was not only the treasure of Latinos; white, black, Asian, and Native American residents of San Francisco had long-term relationships with people, institutions, traditions, particular locations. Disruption has been a favorite word of the new tech economy, but old-timers saw homes, communities, traditions, and relationships being disrupted. Many of the people being evicted and priced out were the people who held us all together: teachers, nurses, counselors, social workers, carpenters and mechanics, volunteers and activists. When, for example, someone who worked with gang kids got driven out, those kids were abandoned. How many threads could you pull out before the social fabric disintegrated?

Two months before the funeral, the real estate website Redfin looked at the statistics and concluded that 83 percent of California’s homes, and 100 percent of San Francisco’s, were unaffordable on a teacher’s salary. What happens to a place when the most vital workers cannot afford to live in it? Displacement has contributed to deaths, particularly of the elderly—and many in their eighties and nineties have been targeted with eviction from their homes of many decades. In the two years since Nieto’s death, there have been multiple stories of seniors who died during or immediately after their eviction. A survey reported that 71 percent of the homeless in San Francisco used to be housed there. Losing their homes makes them vulnerable to a host of conditions, some of them deadly. Gentrification can be fatal.

It also brings white newcomers to neighborhoods with nonwhite populations, sometimes with appalling consequences. Local newspaper the East Bay Express recently reported that in Oakland, recently arrived white people sometimes regard “people of color who are walking, driving, hanging out, or living in the neighborhood” as “criminal suspects.” Some use the website Nextdoor.com to post comments “labeling Black people as suspects simply for walking down the street, driving a car, or knocking on a door.” The same thing happens in the Mission, where people post things on Nextdoor such as “I called the police a few times when is more then three kids standing like soldiers in the corner,” chat with one another about homeless people as dangers who need to be removed, and justify police killings others see as criminal. What’s clear in the case of Nieto’s death is that a series of white men perceived him as more dangerous than he was and that he died from it.

On March 1, 2016, the day the trial began, hundreds of students at San Francisco public schools walked out of class to protest Nieto’s killing. A big demonstration was held in front of the federal courthouse, with drummers, Aztec dancers in feathered regalia, people holding signs, and a TV station interviewing Nieto’s friend Benjamin Bac Sierra. Nieto’s face on posters, banners, T-shirts, and murals had become a familiar sight in the Mission; a few videos about the case had been made; demonstrations and memorials had been held. For some, Nieto stood for victims of police brutality and for a Latino community that felt imperiled by gentrification, by the wave of evictions and the people who regarded them as menaces and intruders in their own neighborhood. Many people who cared about the Nietos came to the trial each day, and the courtroom was usually nearly full.

Trials are theater, and this one had its dramas. Adante Pointer, a black lawyer with the Oakland firm of John Burris, which handles a lot of local police-killing lawsuits, represented Refugio and Elvira Nieto, the plaintiffs. Their star witness, Antonio Theodore, had come forward months after the killing. Theodore is an immigrant from Trinidad, a musician in the band Afrolicious, and a resident of the Bernal area. An elegant man with neat shoulder-length dreads who came to court in a suit, he said he had been on a trail above the road, walking a dog, and that he had seen the whole series of events unfold. He testified that Nieto’s hands were in his pockets—that he had not pointed his Taser at the officers, there was no red laser light; the officers had just shouted “stop” and then opened fire.

When Pointer asked him why he had not come forward earlier, he replied: “Just think: it would be hard to tell an officer that I just saw fellow officers shooting up somebody. I didn’t trust the police.” Theodore testified cogently under questioning from Pointer. But the next morning, when city attorney Margaret Baumgartner, an imposing white woman with a resentful air, questioned him, he fell apart. He contradicted his earlier testimony about where he had been and where the shooting took place, then declared that he was an alcoholic with memory problems. He seemed to be trying to make himself safe by making himself useless. Pointer questioned him again, and he said: “I don’t care to be here right now. I feel threatened.” When witnesses are mistrustful or fearful of police, justice is hard to come by, and Theodore seemed terrified of them.

The details of what had happened were hotly debated and often contradictory, especially with regard to the Taser. The police had testified as though Nieto had been a superhuman or inhuman opponent, facing them off even as they fired into his body again and again, then dropping to a “tactical sniper posture” on the ground, still holding the Taser with its red laser pointing at them. The city lawyers brought in a Taser expert whose official testimony seemed to favor them, but when he was asked by Pointer to look at the crime-scene photos, he said the Taser was off and that it was not something easily or accidentally turned on or off. Was Nieto busy toggling the small on-off switch while also busy having his body hammered by the bullets that killed him on the spot? The light is on only when the Taser is on. Officer Morse had testified that when he arrived to kick it out of Nieto’s hands there were no red light or wires coming from it. The Taser wires are, however, visible in the police photographs documenting the scene.

The Taser expert told the court that Nieto’s Taser’s internal record said the trigger had been pulled three times. The Taser’s internal clock said these trigger pulls had happened on March 22, after Nieto was dead. The expert witness also said it was set to Greenwich mean time and recalculated the time to place these trigger pulls at 7:14 p.m. the night he died. The police didn’t have contact with him until 7:17 p.m. The Taser expert then created a new theory of “clock drift,” under which Nieto’s Taser fired at exactly the right time to corroborate the police version that the Taser was on and used at the time they shot him. Even if the trigger was pulled, it is not evidence that he was pointing the Taser at them. When a Taser is fired, confetti-like marker tags are ejected; none were found at the scene of the crime. Taser has, incidentally, just negotiated a $2 million contract with the police department.

One piece of evidence produced was a fragment of bone found in the pocket of Nieto’s jacket. Some thought this proved that his hands had been in his pockets, as Theodore said. Dr. Amy Hart, the city coroner, said in the trial on Friday, March 4, that there were no photographs of his red 49ers jacket, which must have been full of bullet holes. The following Monday, an expert witness for the city mentioned the photographs of the jacket that the city had supplied him. The jurors were shown photographs of Nieto’s hat, which had a bullet hole in it that corresponded to the hole in his temple, and of his broken sunglasses lying next to a puddle of blood. The coroner testified to abrasions on Nieto’s face consistent with Nieto wearing glasses. Before this evidence was shown, Officer Richard Schiff had testified under oath that he made eye contact with Nieto and saw his forehead pucker up in a frown. If the dead man had been wearing a hat and dark glasses, then Schiff could not have seen these things. Finally, how could four police officers fire fifty-nine bullets at someone without noticing that he was not firing back? And what are we to make of their reports of “muzzle flash” from an object incapable of producing muzzle flashes?

When Elvira Nieto testified about her devastation at the death of her son, Pointer asked her about her husband’s feelings as well. “Objection,” shouted Baumgartner, as though what a wife said about her husband’s grief should be disqualified as hearsay. The judge overruled her. At another point, Justin Fritz apologized to the Nietos for the outcome of his 911 call and seemed distressed. Refugio Nieto allowed Fritz to hug him; his wife did not. “Refugio later said that at that moment he was reminded of Alex’s words,” Adriana told me, “that even with the people that we have conflict with, we need to take the higher ground and show the best of ourselves.”

Adriana sat with the Nietos every day of the trial, translating for them when the court-appointed translator was off duty. Bac Sierra, in an impeccable suit and tie, was right behind them every day, in the first of three rows of benches usually full of friends and supporters. Nieto’s uncle often attended, as did Ely Flores, another young Latino who was Nieto’s best friend and a fellow Buddhist. Flores later told me that he and Alex had been friends who tried to support each other in living up to their vows and ideals. He said that they wanted to be “pure lotuses” in their communities, a reference to the key Buddhist phrase about being “a pure lotus in muddy water,” something spiritual that arises from the messiness of everyday life.

Flores had been studying to be a police officer at City College, seeing this as the way he could be of service to his community, but when Nieto was killed, he told me he realized he could never wear a badge or carry a gun. He abandoned the career he’d worked toward for years and started over, training in a culinary academy as a chef. He suggested that Nieto didn’t see the police as adversaries and thought that he might instead not have understood that they were coming for him when he walked around the bend in the road that evening, not acted according to the rules for men who are considered suspects and menaces in everyday life.

It was a civil trial, so the standard was not “beyond a reasonable doubt,” just the “preponderance of evidence.” No one was facing prison, but if the city and officers were found liable, there could be a large financial settlement and it could affect the careers of the policemen. The trial was covered by many journalists from local TV stations and newspapers. On Thursday, March 10, 2016, after an afternoon and morning of deliberations, the eight jurors—five white, one Asian woman, and two Asian men, none black, none Latino—unanimously ruled in favor of the police on all counts. Flores wept in the hallway. The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California published a response to the verdict headlined WOULD ALEX NIETO STILL BE ALIVE IF HE WERE WHITE? Police are now investigating claims that Officer Morse posted a sneering attack on Nieto on a friend’s Facebook page that night.

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San Francisco is now a cruel place and a divided one. A month before the trial, the city’s mayor, Ed Lee, decided to sweep the homeless off the streets for the Super Bowl, even though the game was played forty miles away, at the new 49ers stadium in Silicon Valley. Online rants about the city’s homeless population have become symptomatic of the city’s culture clash. The open letter to the mayor published in mid-February by Justin Keller, founder of a not very successful start-up, was typical in tone: “I know people are frustrated about gentrification happening in the city, but the reality is, we live in a free market society. The wealthy working people have earned their right to live in the city. They went out, got an education, work hard, and earned it. I shouldn’t have to worry about being accosted. I shouldn’t have to see the pain, struggle, and despair of homeless people to and from my way to work every day.” And like Evan Snow, who wanted to blow away Alejandro Nieto after their encounter, Keller got his wish in a way. Pushed out of other areas, hundreds of homeless people began to set up tents under the freeway overpass around Division Street on the edge of the Mission, a gritty industrial area with few residences. The mayor destroyed this rainy-season refuge too: city workers threw tents and belongings into dump trucks and hounded the newly property-less onward. One of the purges came before dawn the morning the Nieto trial began.

When the trial ended with a verdict in favor of the police, 150 or so people gathered inside at the Mission Cultural Center and outside on rainy Mission Street. People were composed, resolute, disappointed, but far from shocked. It was clear that most of them had never counted on validation from the legal system that what happened to Alex Nieto was wrong. Their sense of principle and history was not going to be swayed by this verdict, even if they were saddened or angered by it. Bac Sierra, out of his courtroom suits and in a T-shirt and cap, spoke passionately, as did Oscar Salinas, who had just posted on Facebook the words “Alex you will never be forgotten, your parents will always be taken care of by us, the community. As I’ve always said, the unspoken word of La Mision is when someone is hurting, needs help, or passes we come together as a family and take care of them.”

The Nietos spoke, with Adriana translating for those who did not understand Spanish. And Adriana spoke on her own behalf: “One of the most important changes in my path being involved in the Alex Nieto case has been to learn more about restorative practices, because as someone trained in legal systems, I know that the pain and fear that we are not safe from police in our communities will not go away until there is personal accountability by those who harm us.”

Adriana, her historian husband, and their friends—including an AIDS activist and a queer choreographer—who live nearby in a ramshackle old building, had faced their own eviction battle last year, and won it. But the community that came together that night was still vulnerable to the economic forces tearing the city apart. Many of these people may have to move on soon; some already have.

The death of Alex Nieto is a story of one young man torn apart by bullets, and of a community coming together to remember him. They pursued more than justice, as the case became a cause, as the expressions became an artistic outpouring in videos, posters, and memorials, and as friendships and alliances were forged and strengthened. On April 7, less than a month after the trial, the police shot longtime San Franciscan Luis Gongora to death, claiming he was rushing them with a knife. Eyewitnesses from the little homeless community he was part of and from surrounding buildings and a security video suggested otherwise. People became angrier about the police they saw as part of a city government wiping out the black and Latino communities.

After the verdict and the killing of Gongora, five people went on a hunger strike in front of the Mission police station, fasting for eighteen days in their Hunger for Justice campaign to force the police chief to resign. Conventional wisdom dismissed their perspective and their effort, but on the afternoon of the day that police killed an unarmed mother—Jessica Nelson Williams—in her twenties, the police chief was forced to resign. At the demonstration that night at the industrial site where Williams died of a single bullet, two women held a banner that said WE ARE THE LAST 3%. The black population had plummeted since its peak in the mid-teens thirty years earlier. Down the block tucked under a freeway overpass, gentrifying homes were visible, styled in what you could call fortress modernism.

That night in March, in the gathering for the anniversary of Nieto’s killing, Adriana Camarena told the crowd: “Our victory, as the Nietos said yesterday, is that we are still together.” That too is a fragile and insecure condition.