As a teen he had worked as a youth counselor for almost five years at the Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center; he was gregarious and community spirited, a participant in political campaigns, street fairs, and community events.

He had graduated from community college with a focus on criminal justice, and hoped to help young people as a probation officer. He had an internship with the city’s juvenile probation department not long before his death, according to former city probation officer Carlos Gonzalez, who became a friend. Gonzalez said Nieto knew how criminal justice worked in the city. No one has ever provided a convincing motive for why he would point a gun-shaped object at the police when he understood that it would probably be a fatal act.

Like a rape victim, the dead young man underwent character assassination as irrelevant but unflattering things were dredged up about his past and publicized. Immediately after his death, the police and coroner’s office dug into his medical records and found that he’d had a mental health crisis years before. They blew that up into a story that he was mentally ill and made that an explanation for what happened. It ran like this: Why did they shoot Nieto? Because he pointed his Taser at them and they thought it was a gun. Why did he point his Taser at them? Because he was mentally ill. Why should we believe he was mentally ill? Because he pointed his Taser at them. It’s a circular logic that leads somewhere only if your trust in the San Francisco Police Department is great.

Nieto carried a Taser for his guard job at the El Toro Night Club, whose owner, Jorge del Rio, speaks of him as a calm and peaceful person he liked, trusted, admired, and still cares about: “He was very calm, a very calm guy. So I was very surprised to hear that they claim that he pulled a Taser on the police. Never have seen him react aggressively to anyone. He was the guy who would want to help others. I just can’t believe they’re saying this about him.” He told me how peaceful Nieto was, how brilliant at defusing potentially volatile situations, drawing drunk men out of the rowdy dance club with a Spanish-speaking clientele to tell them on the street “tonight’s not your night” and send them home feeling liked and respected.

From the beginning the police were hoping that Alex Nieto’s mental health records would somehow exonerate them. The justification that he was mentally ill got around, and it got some traction in local publications committed to justifying the police. But it was ruled inadmissible evidence by the judge in the civil suit brought by his parents, Refugio and Elvira Nieto. The medical records said that three years earlier Alex Nieto had some sort of breakdown and was treated for it. Various terms were thrown around—psychosis, paranoid schizophrenia—but the entire file was from 2011 and there seemed to be no major precedents or subsequent episodes of note. The theory that mental illness is relevant presumes not only that he was mentally ill on March 21, 2014, but that mental illness caused him to point a Taser at the police. If you don’t believe he pointed a Taser at the police, then mental illness doesn’t supply any clues to what happened. Did he? The only outside witness to the shooting says he did not.

Here’s the backstory as I heard it from a family friend: Devastated by a breakup, Alex got very dramatic about it one day, burned some love letters, and was otherwise over the top in the tiny apartment the four Nietos shared. His exasperated family called a city hotline for help in de-escalating, but instead got escalation: Nieto was seized and institutionalized against his will. The official record described burning the letters as burning a book or trying to burn down the house—something might have gotten lost in translation from Spanish. That was in early 2011; there was another incident later that year. In 2012, 2013, and until his death in 2014 there appear to have been no problems. There is no reason to believe that, even if what transpired in 2011 should be classified as mental illness, he suddenly relapsed on the evening of his death, after years of being exceptionally calm in the chaos of his nightclub job. And shortly before his encounter with the police, he exercised restraint in a confrontation with an aggressor.

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On the evening of March 21, 2014, Evan Snow, a thirtysomething “user experience design professional,” according to his LinkedIn profile, who had moved to the neighborhood about six months earlier (and who has since departed for a more suburban location), took his young Siberian husky for a walk on Bernal Hill. As Snow was leaving the park, Nieto was coming up one of the little dirt trails that leads to the park’s ring road, eating chips. In a deposition prior to the trial, Snow said that with his knowledge of the attire of gang members, he “put Nieto in that category of people that I would not mess around with.”

His dog put Nieto in the category of people carrying food, and went after him. Snow never seemed to recognize that his out-of-control dog was the aggressor: “So Luna was, I think, looking to move around the benches or behind me to run up happily to get a chip from Mr.