Police fatally shot 25-year-old Asa Sullivan on June 6 inside an apartment. He was the San Francisco police department’s 17th victim in the last 10 years.
 Asa Sullivan, killed by the San Francisco police. |
Sullivan was Black, poor and unarmed. He leaves behind a grieving family including his mother, four siblings and a 6-year-old son.
He was gunned down in a two-and-a-half foot crawl space after fleeing to the attic from an illegal police raid into his friend’s apartment. It is clear that he had no intention of confronting the cops.
The police version of Sullivan’s murder has changed drastically to cover up their crime. For the first 16 hours following his killing, the police maintained that they had killed a young man with a gun who had fired on them first. Later they claimed that they mistook an eyeglass case for a gun.
But the police never entered the attic or the entrance to the crawl space before they began firing dozens of times into the ceiling where Sullivan was hiding. Later, as they evacuated his body, the police ripped out the whole ceiling to hide their bullet holes.
Three cops had come to the apartment because of a complaint from a neighbor about suspicious activity. Sullivan and his friend Jason Martin were in the apartment legally, helping clean up for the tenants who had already moved out.
When the cops showed up, Sullivan hid in the crawl space to avoid being captured. There was already a warrant for his arrest for marijuana. Asa didn’t want to go back to jail.
It was too late. In an instant, the arrest warrant had become a death warrant.
The chief of police later claimed, cynically, that this event “shows the extreme difficulties and stressful circumstances” for police officers.
The district attorney hasn’t classified Sullivan’s death as an “unlawful killing.” No money from either the DA’s office or the state has been made available to help with Sullivan’s burial expenses.
On June 10, community members staged a protest at the apartment complex in response to Asa Sullivan’s killing. Many of the dozens of protesters had also lost loved ones at the hands of San Francisco’s killer police.
The protesters demanded an immediate investigation into Sullivan’s death and into the murder of all victims of racial profiling and murder by the San Francisco police department over the last 10 years.
