When Christina Onopa didn’t hear from her son on Saturday morning, she began to panic.
Onopa said her 17-year-old boy, Rolando Jose Dusuau, always returned her calls. On Friday evening, he left their Potrero Hill home to meet someone Onopa figured was a friend. Minutes dragged into hours — and her calls and texts went unanswered. By the next morning, he still wasn’t home.
“Something didn’t sit right with me,” Onopa said. “He wouldn’t just take off like this.” That Saturday morning, Onopa called the police and filed a missing persons report.
It wasn’t until late that night that she learned her son, who she says everyone knew as “RJ,” had been shot and killed just 13 minutes after leaving home.
RJ was found unresponsive by police on Friday evening, suffering from gunshot wounds on the 1100 block of Wisconsin Street, a block that borders the Potrero Hill Terrace and Annex public housing complex and Starr King Elementary School. He was less than a mile from his home.
In a statement from the police department, which misidentified RJ as an adult male, the San Francisco Police Department said paramedics attempted to render aid, but that he died at the scene.
One day later, another teen, who has not been named due to his age, was arrested in connection to the killing.
Onopa, a single mother with two other younger sons, aged 13 and 5, described RJ as “a good friend” to everyone. “He was very smart, he was driven, he was funny,” she said. RJ, she said, was set to graduate next year from George Washington High School, and was working toward getting his driver’s license.
“He had all these goals,” Onopa said. RJ was completing his training to be a youth counselor at Horizons, a San Francisco nonprofit for at-risk Latino youth and other youth of color.
When news broke of his death, her phone was flooded with messages. “He was loved by a lot of people,” she said. “Everyone was telling me how he helped them get through things. He was a good person. He always wanted to help.”
RJ rarely smiled in photos — but in pictures provided by his work, he was always grinning, she said.
Her son, she said, “went through a lot at such a young age.” Three years prior, when he was just 14 years old, RJ lost his father to suicide, and Onopa and her family said they have struggled in the years since. Onopa posted a fundraiser to GoFundMe to help pay for funeral expenses, which has since raised approximately $6,500.
Little is known about the circumstances surrounding RJ’s death, and Onopa said she does not know of anyone who would want to hurt her son. She speculated that he likely left home with someone he knew and trusted.
RJ’s death is the second fatal shooting at the Potrero Hill Terrace and Annex complex this year. In February, Cornelius Wigfall, Jr., 44, was shot and killed and a child wounded as they sat in a parked car. The complex is currently undergoing redevelopment into a mixed-income area.
RJ, said Onopa, was “an all-around good kid,” who loved basketball and videogames. “We don’t know who and we don’t know why,” Onopa said. “We just miss him a lot. I feel empty.”