The Death of Amilcar Perez Lopez
On February 26, 2015, a few blocks from my house, two undercover police officers shot Amilcar Perez Lopez, a 20-year-old Guatemalan man, six times in the back. The Mission District Episcopal church I belong to helped raise money for his family. As the members of my church community would come to understand from them, he was working in the United States without documents, the sole support for his parents and younger siblings back home in Guatemala. Through his efforts, he’d sent them enough money to bring electricity and running water to their thatched roof adobe house.
On the day he died, he was involved in some kind of altercation with a man who may have accused him of stealing his bicycle. After that ended, according to the civil suit his parents brought against the city, he was walking home along Folsom Street when accosted by those undercover police officers, named in the suit as Craig Tiffe and Eric Riboli. The two “surreptitiously rushed at Amilcar from behind.” One of them got him in a “bear hug.” Amilcar spoke very little English. It’s likely he had no idea that they were police officers. In any case, he managed to get free and started running down the sidewalk. That’s when they shot him.
The official police story was that he lunged at them with a knife and the officers had to shoot him to save their own lives. And that story might have stuck, had the family’s attorney not commissioned a private autopsy, which was performed by Dr. A.J. Chapman, a forensic pathologist in Santa Rosa, California. The city had already done its own autopsy when Dr. Chapman received Amilcar’s body, but had issued no report. Chapman found that Amilcar had taken six shots in the back, five to the torso and right arm, and one to the back of his head. If he was shot while attacking the two officers, why did the bullets strike him from behind?
It took the city’s Medical Examiner’s Office five months to release its autopsy, which ultimately concluded the same thing. What might that report have said if activists had not arranged for a private, unbiased report? There’s no way to know.