Arriving back at our home felt surreal—there was no cosmological reason why my brothers and I were allowed to grow up there rather than in one of the homes we just left. Improbability demands stories. Each one of us in America could have grown up someone else had the universe’s mysterious finger touched a different key. Later in life, when both of my brothers were briefly homeless at separate times, I discovered how even with comfortable upbringings the ladder of society can slip from right beneath you. Back then I didn’t have the stories I needed to know this was possible—I just had this one trip. I was lucky.

DEATH BY GENTRIFICATION:THE KILLING OF ALEX NIETO AND THE SAVAGING OF SAN FRANCISCO

Rebecca Solnit

ON WHAT WOULD have been his thirtieth birthday, Alejandro Nieto’s parents left a packed courtroom in San Francisco shortly before pictures from their son’s autopsy were shown to a jury. The photographs showed what happens when fourteen bullets rip through a person’s head and body. Refugio and Elvira Nieto spent much of the rest of the day sitting on a bench in the windowless hall of the federal building where their civil lawsuit for their son’s wrongful death was being heard.

Alex Nieto was twenty-eight years old when he was killed in the neighborhood where he had spent his whole life. He died in a barrage of bullets fired at him by four San Francisco policemen. There are a few things about his death that everyone agrees on: he was in a hilltop park eating a burrito and tortilla chips, wearing the Taser he owned for his job as a licensed security guard at a nightclub, when someone called 911 on him a little after seven p.m. on the evening of March 21, 2014. The police officers who arrived a few minutes later claim that Nieto defiantly pointed the Taser at them, and that they mistook its red laser light for the laser sights of a gun, and shot him in self-defense. However, the stories of the four officers contradict one another’s and some of the evidence.

On the road that curves around the green hilltop of Bernal Heights Park is an unofficial memorial to Nieto. People walking dogs or running or taking a stroll stop to read the banner, which is pinned by stones to the slope of the hill and surrounded by fresh and artificial flowers. Alex’s father, Refugio, still visits the memorial at least once a day, walking up from his small apartment on the south side of Bernal Hill. Alex Nieto had been visiting the hilltop since he was a child: that evening his parents, joined by friends and supporters, went up there in the dark to bring a birthday cake to the memorial.

Refugio and Elvira Nieto are dignified, modest people, straight-backed but careworn, who speak eloquently in Spanish and hardly at all in English. They had known each other as poor children in a little town in the state of Guanajuato in central Mexico and emigrated separately to the Bay Area in the 1970s. There, they met again and married in 1984. They have lived in the same building on the south slope of Bernal Hill ever since. She worked for decades as a housekeeper in San Francisco’s downtown hotels and is now retired. He had worked on the side, but mostly stayed at home as the principal caregiver of Alex and his younger brother, Hector.

In the courtroom, Hector, handsome, somber, with glossy black hair pulled back neatly, sat with his parents most days, not far from the three white and one Asian policemen who killed his brother. That there was a trial at all was a triumph. The city had withheld from family and supporters the full autopsy report and the names of the officers who shot Nieto, and it was months before the key witness overcame his fear of the police to come forward.

Nieto died because a series of white men saw him as a menacing intruder in the place he had spent his whole life. Some of them thought he was possibly a gang member because he was wearing a red jacket. Many Latino boys and men in San Francisco avoid wearing red and blue because they are the colors of two gangs, the Norteños and Sureños—but the colors of San Francisco’s football team, the 49ers, are red and gold. Wearing a 49ers jacket in San Francisco is as ordinary as wearing a Saints jersey in New Orleans. That evening, Nieto, who had thick black eyebrows and a closely cropped goatee, was wearing a new-looking 49ers jacket, a black 49ers cap, a white T-shirt, black trousers, and carried the Taser in a holster on his belt, under his jacket. (A Taser shoots out wires that deliver an electrical shock, briefly paralyzing its target; it is shaped roughly like a gun, but more bulbous; Nieto’s had bright yellow markings over much of its surface and a fifteen-foot range.)

Nieto had first been licensed by the state as a security guard in 2007 and had worked in that field since. He had never been arrested and had no police record, an achievement in a neighborhood where Latino kids can get picked up just for hanging out in public. He was a Buddhist: a Latino son of immigrants who practiced Buddhism is the kind of hybrid San Francisco used to be good at.