The San Francisco Police Department on Thursday presented camera footage of the man who was shot by officers in the Tenderloin last month.
The video revealed that when officers shot 54-year-old Richard Everett, he had been advancing up the sidewalk with the knife, a duffel bag and a crate, seemingly believing he could leave the scene, while officers made it clear he could not.
Soon after Everett began to advance up the sidewalk and drew a knife, officers — standing behind cars or in the middle of Jones Street — began to shoot. It appeared from footage that it was only after officers began shooting that Everett turned toward them, gesticulating wildly with the 8.5-inch knife.
He was quickly felled by incoming fire, and collapsed face-down on the ground.
Everett remains in serious condition, according to Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital.
It was unclear why officers began to shoot. Up until that point, the officers had tried calmly and insistently for more than 15 minutes to get Everett to drop his knife. He refused. One officer said to another that Everett appeared to be rambling.
When a bystander told officers that Everett is called Louisiana, they began to call him by that name. But Everett continued to carry the knife, and it appeared that he thought he could wander off, knife in hand, without any consequences.
The department, in a virtual town hall meeting today at 3 p.m., provided its legally mandated update on the police shooting and showed footage of the incident, which occurred on Jones Street between Ellis and Eddy streets.
Police officers responded to a 911 call at 10:22 p.m. regarding a person who was holding a knife and threatening people, according to Acting Commander Mark Im, who presented the department’s findings.
In audio of the 911 call presented at the meeting, viewers could hear as a resident looking out his window at the man told the police dispatcher that the man had threatened people and had been pepper-sprayed. “Hey! Put that knife away!” the caller yelled at Everett, according to the 911 call.
The caller was viewing Everett from his ground-floor window.
Officers then arrived at the scene at 10:27 p.m. and yelled at pedestrians to leave the area, quickly requesting an ambulance and speaking to the man, later identified as Everett. “Put the knife down,” one officer said.
That officer’s body-camera footage showed Everett, hooded in a red-and-black plaid jacket when they arrived on the scene, standing on the pavement in front of an apartment, raising a knife up and down. Most pedestrians had, by then, left the area, and officers continued to clear the block.
Shortly after they arrived, the officers blocked the sidewalks with their patrol cars to keep passers-by away. They continued to speak to Everett, asking him to put down the knife.
“Sir, we’re not here to hurt you. Okay? But we got to figure out what’s going on. We can’t do that until you put the knife down,” said an officer, according to the body camera footage.
According to Commander Im, Everett responded saying, “Almighty God gave me this knife.”
A person standing by who claimed to know Everett also spoke to him, according to the footage. “You gotta put the knife down,” the spectator said.
After approximately 15 minutes of back-and-forth conversation between Everett and the officers, body-camera footage showed Everett picking up a milk crate and bag and walking down the sidewalk, in the general direction of several officers, drawing the knife from his waistline.
The distance between him and the officers at the time the officers began shooting was unclear from the footage, and the department did not disclose it.
The officers responded by shooting at him 13 times — seven bean-bag rounds and, within seconds, six handgun rounds, according to the police. Everett ran wildly at the officers after the initial shots were fired, swinging his knife and dropping his belongings on the ground. He collapsed in the middle of the street, twitching as a semi-circle of officers advanced towards him. People screamed “No!” from the surrounding area.
He was then lifted by officers onto a gurney before being transported to the hospital.
Two officers shot Everett: Gabriel Arteaga and Russell Lucia, both patrol officers with Tenderloin Station.
There were no comments from the public following the presentation. The event is currently under investigation by the San Francisco Department of Police Accountability, as well as the District Attorney’s Office.
Open and closed case. Crazy man with a knife who was threatening residents in the area (per 911 callers). Cops located him and secured the block. They isolated him from the public. Cops took their time and tried to communicate with him. He refused to do anything but arm himself with a very large Rambo style knife. He then moved towards the cops and started waving the kite around. Anybody who doesn’t see the threat is just lying to themselves and ML readers.
I just don’t understand why SFPD has yet to figure out how to deal with people like this guy. A dozen officers stood around for 20 minutes just waiting for an excuse to fire. Meanwhile 10 cars got broken into and 5 more people od’d on fentanyl. Nice work police! Thanks fire keeping us safe!
Uh, what would you suggest it should have been done instead?
They’d check on the broken into cars and let a guy walk away with a 8.5 in knife thinking he’s god?
So the SFPD “use of force” policy calls for “de-escalation” in time and space. After 3 or 4 years, does anyone have the slightest idea what that means? After talking to the guy calmly and the cops all barricaded behind cars, when he began to move toward them, they shot and and killed him. Fortunately the “acting” DA, will no doubt find that the cops were in imminent danger so had every reason to suddenly escalate. Does it matter? As some ML commenters and fans of Elon Musk will be quick to cry out, with no facts, that Mr. Everett was a “zombie junkie mentally ill addict from Honduras” who was intent on making San Francisco a doom loop shithole, so deserved to be removed by any means necessary.
They didn’t kill him. Per this very article, he’s in the hospital in serious condition.
I live in the Tenderloin and walked down this same sidewalk less than two hours before “Louisiana” was shot. An unhinged man in an argument with someone around the corner (facing the police station) swaggered toward me— I was scared but ignored him. Was he the same man? I don’t know. These types of things happen often here.
The best video is that made by the witness. I believe the police videos are biased. There must have been 20 officers there. Did they all have body cams?
I am angry with the stupid way the police interacted with the man. They had many options to deal with him but in the end resorted to overwhelming force.
They kept calling out they were there “to help him.” Trust me— by the time one ends up destitute on hard city streets they have been lied to a hundred times with the same hollow words.
It is no secret that many homeless and mentally ill people carry weapons to protect themselves. The police do not protect them. In my neighborhood the corner merchants gave up calling the police when robbed long ago. On the very same block as the Tenderloin station, the police do not come fast enough, and they do nothing. Dope dealers or their assistants sit in lawn chairs with screwed faces all day, every day, on the corners blasting music from speakers. They bully and intimidate everyone who passes by. The same block as the Tenderloin Station!
Poor Louisiana! He is a symbol of our nation’s failure to take care of its own.
I understand that 50,000 Ukrainian soldiers are now amputees. 300,000 to 400,000 are dead where a Ukrainian conscript has a lifespan of about 4 minutes at Russia’s frontline. We have billions for the comedian turned politician Zelensky, but we have nothing left for our own working class.
Our police are more militaristic than ever— and they have the weapons to confront anyone including our saddest, sickest, and poorest.
Poor Louisiana! Where is his family? Do they know? Do they care?
John Donne had it right. “Never send to whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.”
Crowded buses. Shortened BART trains. The ruling class doesn’t care how many may catch the latest variant of COVID. Those behind such programs are much more lethal than an unhinged man who, if left alone, would have probably fallen asleep.
Mission Local will not allow anyone to comment who does not attack the police. So only the far-left editor who rejects such comments will see this. But I’ll try anyway.
The guy was waving a knife around for 15 minutes. In any rational city there would be no problem with the police shooting him.
I hope all the readers here supporting him go out tonight to the Tenderloin, find one of the homeless people there, and take them home for a good meal. Until you have them in your home, stop telling the rest of us how harmless they are.
Hi Sarah —
These comments are monitored in real-time. I can assure you that, regardless of your political worldview, nobody is waiting in front of a keyboard for you or anyone to gift us with a comment.
We do not edit out comments that are critical of police or laudatory of police or anything like that. Rather, we edit out comments that ramble, that make ad-hominem attacks, that force us into extensive fact-checking that we cannot do, or, for lack of a better word, have little to no redeeming value and don’t reflect well on our site.
If you’ve been rejected in the past, it’s probably for one or more of the above reasons.
Thanks for writing,
JE