Call Them by Their True Names

by Rebecca Solnit

  Nieto owned the 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 found some traction in local publications committed to exculpating the police. But it was ruled inadmissible evidence by the judge in the civil suit brought by his parents. The medical records said that Alex Nieto had some sort of breakdown and was treated for it three years earlier. Various terms were thrown around—psychosis, paranoid schizophrenia—but the entire file was from 2011, and there seemed to be no major preceding 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 acting out in the tiny apartment the four Nietos shared. His exasperated family called a city hotline for help in deescalating the situation, but got the opposite: Nieto was seized and institutionalized against his will. The records turned burning the love letters into burning a book or trying to burn down the house—something may have been 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, he appears to have been a calm, reasonable, well-functioning young man with exceptional altruism and generosity in his dealings with others. 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 tranquil 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. In his three accounts of the subsequent events, 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 woman “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, according to Snow, then pulled back his jacket and took his Taser out, briefly pointing it at the distant dog owner before he pointed the weapon 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 in 2012: execute him without consequences.

  Soon after, a couple out walking their dogs passed by Nieto. Tim Isgitt, then a recent arrival to 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 “email 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 Nieto. “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 pm 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 has never been 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 has become less and less possible as rent and home prices spiral 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. In 2014, Google’s Silicon Valley employees, for example, were 2 percent Black, 3 percent Latino, and 70
percent male. The Google Bus—private luxury shuttles—made it convenient for these employees who worked on the peninsula to live in San Francisco, as did shuttles for Facebook, Apple, Yahoo, and other big corporations. Airbnb, headquartered in San Francisco, became the means of transforming long-term housing stock in rural and urban places around the world into space for upscale transients. Uber, also based here, set about undermining taxi companies that paid a living wage. Another tech company housed here, Twitter, is notorious for letting hate speech and death threats against vulnerable and minority voices go unchecked. 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 Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church faced eviction from the home it had found after an earlier eviction during the late-1990s dot-com boom. That spring, the Sierra Club—perhaps the greatest flagship of San Francisco idealism and altruism, born in the city’s downtown in 1892—left in pursuit of affordable rent. Other nonprofits, social services, cultural and spiritual centers were squeezed out. Resentments rose. And cultures clashed.

  At 7:12 pm 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 deescalate a potentially dangerous situation. One police car broke 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 the evening. They moved rapidly and 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 pm, Alejandro Nieto came walking downhill around a bend in the road, according to the 911 operator’s conversation with Fritz. At 7:18:08 pm, another policeman in the park, but not at the scene, broadcast: “Got a guy in a red shirt coming toward you.” Officer 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 pm, Schiff and Sawyer began barraging Nieto with .40-caliber bullets.

  At 7:18:55 pm, 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. Lieutenant 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 while he was standing. 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 was no plan, no communication, no strategy to contain the person they were pursuing or capture him alive if he proved to be a menace, no attempt to avoid a potentially dangerous confrontation in a popular park where bystanders could be hit. Morse testified in court that Nieto was still upright: “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’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 “I saw the suspect’s head fall down to the pavement.”

  Several more bullets hit Nieto while he was on the ground—a total of at least fourteen hit him overall, according to the city autopsy report. Only a quarter of the bullets the officers fired reached their target—they fired fifty-nine in all into the popular public park at dusk that first day of spring. They were shooting to kill, and to overkill. One went into Alex Nieto’s 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 pm, 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 lost their own sons in police killings and routinely attend the funerals of other such victims. Afterward, 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, had been a devoted friend of and mentor to Alex. Both organized the community in response to Nieto’s killing.

  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, real-estate agents, house-flippers, and developers seeking to open up room for themselves 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 each other, 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 was 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 concluded that 83 percent of California’s homes, and 100 percent of San Francisco’s, were unaffordable on a teacher’s salary. One of the most high-profile eviction cases involved a Google lawyer trying to evict Mission District schoolteachers to merge their longtime homes into a mansion for himself. 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. In the years since Nieto’s death, many seniors have died during or immediately after their evictions. Several were in their nineties; more than one turned a hundred while fighting eviction from her long-term home. Seventy-one percent of the homeless in San Francisco used to be housed here, a recent survey reported. Losing their homes makes them vulnerable to a host of conditions, some of them deadly. Gentrification can be fatal.