This morning, at 8:30a.m. a man stopped in front of the Mission police station, sat down, put a gun in his mouth and fired, according to a witness report. As far as anyone can tell, he died instantly.
“No one saw him come inside. He didn’t have contact with any police officer,” said Lieutenant Troy Dangerfield. Mission police heard the gunshot, and ran outside to find the man sitting slumped against the wall, dead.
For a suicide that happened during a busy commute time just a few blocks from the 16th street BART, there appear to have been surprisingly few witnesses. Police said that as far as they knew there was only one witness account.
The nearest thing to a witness account Mission Loc@l could find was a homeless man who described seeing the same man standing, alive, outside the police station a few minutes earlier. “I didn’t even hear a gunshot,” said Estella Ramos at El Toro taqueria, which is directly adjacent to the police station.
It wasn’t until she overheard one of the customers talking that she realized that anything was out of the ordinary.
At 11 a.m., police stood around the body, waiting for the medical examiner to arrive. The dead man was dressed all in black. He looked like he was in his mid-40’s – Hispanic, or Native American, with short, curly hair. His identity, and motive, remain a mystery.
“We don’t know who he was,” said Dangerfield. “We don’t know why he did it.”
Updates coming.
Many thanks to Lissette Alvarez for contributing reporting to this story.
http://www.thrashermagazine.com/articles/eric-swenson-rip/
I saw the man moments after the bullet went off (I didn’t witness the shooting). If it’s ok to publish his identity, it would mean a lot to me to know a bit of his story so I can honor a life I saw end.
Shaken: This must have been very traumatic. The victim was 64-year-old Eric Swenson. We are working on a story about him now. Best, lc