Another Unarmed Youth Shot and Murdered by SFPD on June 6, 2006

SAN FRANCISCO Police fatally shoot man in friend's attic. Officers thought glasses case was gun and opened fire... Asa B. Sullivan, 25, had his arms outstretched and was holding a "cylindrical object" when the officers confronted him Tuesday night in an apartment near Lake Merced, said Police Chief Heather Fong. The object turned out to be an eyeglasses case.

Police refused to release the officers' names, saying only that one was a male officer with four years' experience on the force and the other was a female officer with the department for three years. The chief conceded that police had given a preliminary account of the shooting to reporters that turned out to have several errors.

Police originally said that Sullivan was armed and had fired through the ceiling, narrowly missing one officer, and that two other officers then opened fire into the ceiling.

A revised update was provided late Wednesday afternoon. The round that went through the floor was a ricochet fired by one of the two officers in the attic, police said.

Fong said she would not identify the officers "at this time,'' adding the officers were on paid administrative leave pending an investigation.

Sullivan's mother, Kathleen Espinosa of Van Nuys (Los Angeles County), said her son had been working for Goodwill Industries in San Francisco. She said that he was not a violent person.
"It was not a justified shooting,'' she said. "There was no weapon, so it was not justified. There are so many ways to do things these days, there's no reason to do this.''
ASA had been doing bricklaying for a short time after the robbery conviction and had later told police he was a caregiver. He had a 5-year-old son.

Asa Sullivan is SFPD murder victim number 17 over the past 10 years. Asa, like all of the 8 other young Black victims of cop murder over the past decade, was shot while unarmed.
In Unity & Respect,
mesha Monge-Irizary