Suspect Pulls a Gun from His Pocket and Takes Aim

At around 4:30 p.m. today, at the corner of 18th and Mission, I watched a man pull a small silver semi-automatic on a victim, who stopped in his tracks when the suspect cocked his pistol and aimed it at him.

The pistol wielder and a female accomplice had just robbed the victim on a bus stopped at 18th and Mission. The victim, a short man in a grey sweatshirt, leapt after them as they ran from the bus, probably intending to retrieve his stolen property (a wallet, I later learned).  

Ten feet behind, I kept walking along with everybody else on the sidewalk, unaware that this running trio was about to cause a commotion.

The victim pursued the pair some 15 feet north before the suspect turned around and reached into a front pocket, pulling out a tiny semi-automatic. I only realized it was a gun after hearing the telltale metallic click of it being cocked. The suspect then aimed it at his pursuer, who – along with everyone else on the sidewalk – stopped immediately. We all moved a few feet to the side in anticipation of things getting uglier.

But the robber and his female friend turned north again and were already half running down Mission towards the 16th Street BART Station. A half block away they melted into a crowd that had no idea they were near an armed man apparently willing to kill (or at least threaten to do so) over $30 – the amount I later learned was in the victim’s wallet.

Once the pair ran, everyone nearby began walking again, occasionally glancing to the side as if  to make sure we had all actually seen the same thing.

I didn’t see anyone call 911, and didn’t really think to do so myself. But five minutes later, as I approached the BART Station, two squad cars pulled up to the curb and four cops rushed down the stairs.  Someone else had obviously called. I dutifully followed and caught up to them on the platform.

The police, now five or six, had stopped a Pittsburg/Bay Point train and were searching it back to front. The short male victim I had seen earlier was with them, and I approached, explaining I was a witness to the whole thing.

Things were routine after that. I was pulled aside, my statement was taken, I got no information from the police, but I had a few seconds while walking with the victim to ask him what had happened.

“Yeah, they took my wallet,” he told me in Spanish. “But it only had $30 in it. It wasn’t even that – it was having that gun pulled on me.”

I told him I’d seen it, and he repeated that that was the only thing that bothered him, before being pulled aside by the cops for further questioning.

Case number conveyed and duly thanked, I got back on BART, unable to further question the victim – still in the throes of talking with the police – and without much information about the whole thing.

The only thought I had was that this would be on tomorrow’s daily crime recap and someone at Mission Local, maybe myself, would be writing up the event as an armed robbery at 18th and Mission, using details provided by me and the victim. It would be lost amidst the sea of crime dutifully summarized for the press every morning by the San Francisco police.

A non-event really. Except, maybe, for the victim. He seemed mostly unfazed about having had a gun pulled on him. But you must feel something being that close to death. The threat seemed real enough, and any small thing – the victim taking one too many steps towards his assailant, the slip of a finger, or just the shooter’s mood – could have changed the situation from a nothing to a very tragic something.

I could have been witness to a murder instead.