Airbnb, headquartered in San Francisco, became the engine that devoured long-term housing stock in rural and urban places around the world, turning it into space for transients. Uber, also based here, set about undermining taxi companies that paid a living wage. Another tech company housed here, Twitter, became the most efficient way to deliver rape and death threats to outspoken feminists. San Francisco, once a utopia in the eyes of many, became the nerve center of a new dystopia.

Tech companies created multimillionaires and billionaires whose influence warped local politics, pushing for policies that served the new industry and their employees at the expense of the rest of the population. None of the money sloshing around the city trickled down to preserve the center for homeless youth that closed in 2013, or the oldest black-owned, black-focused bookstore in the country, which closed in 2014, or San Francisco’s last lesbian bar, which folded in 2015, or the Latino drag and trans bar that closed the year before. As the Nieto trial unfolded, the uniquely San Franciscan African Orthodox Church of St. John Coltrane faced eviction from the home it found after an earlier eviction during the late-1990s dot-com boom. Resentments rose. And cultures clashed.

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At 7:12 p.m. on the evening of March 21, 2014, the police dispatcher who had spoken to Fritz put out a call. Some police officers began establishing a periphery, a standard way to de-escalate a potentially dangerous situation. One police car shot through the periphery to create a confrontation. In it were Lieutenant Jason Sawyer and Officer Richard Schiff, a rookie who had been on the job for less than three months. They headed for Bernal Heights Park when they got the call, tried first to enter it in their patrol car from the south side, the side where Alex’s parents lived, then turned around and drove in from the north side, going around the barrier that keeps vehicles out and heading up the road that is often full of runners, walkers, and dogs at that time of day. They moved rapidly, but without lights or sirens; they were not heading into an emergency. But they were rushing past their fellow officers and the periphery without coordinating a plan.

At 7:17:40 p.m., Alejandro Nieto came walking downhill around a bend in the road, according to the 911 operator’s conversation with Fritz. At 7:18:08 p.m., another policeman in the park, but not at the scene, broadcast: “Got a guy in a red shirt coming toward you.” Schiff testified in court, “Red could be related to a gang involvement. Red is a Norteño color.” Schiff testified that from about ninety feet away he shouted, “Show me your hands,” and that Nieto had replied, “No, show me your hands,” then drew his Taser, assuming a fighting stance, holding the weapon in both hands pointed at the police. The officers claim that the Taser projected a red light, which they assumed was the laser sight of a handgun, and feared for their lives. At 7:18:43 p.m., Schiff and Sawyer began barraging Nieto with .40-caliber bullets.

At 7:18:55 p.m., Schiff shouted, “Red,” a police code word for out of ammunition. He had emptied a whole clip at Nieto. He reloaded, and began shooting again, firing twenty-three bullets in all. Sawyer was also blazing away. He fired twenty bullets. Their aim appears to have been sloppy, because Fritz, who had taken refuge in a grove of eucalyptus trees below the road, can be heard shouting, “Help! Help!” on his call to the 911 operator, as bullets fired by the police were “hitting the trees above me, breaking things and just coming at me.” Sawyer said: “Once I realized there was no reaction, none at all, after being shot, I picked up my sights and aimed for the head.” Nieto was hit just above the lip by a bullet that shattered his right upper jaw and teeth. Another ripped through both bones of his lower right leg. Though the officers testify that he remained facing them, that latter bullet went in the side of his leg, as though he had turned away. That while so agonizingly injured he remained focused on pretending to menace the police with a useless device that drew fire to him is hard to believe.

Two more officers, Roger Morse and Nate Chew, drove up to the first patrol car, got out, and drew their guns. There were no plan, no communications, no strategy to contain the person they were pursuing or capture him alive if he proved to be a menace, to avoid a potentially dangerous confrontation in a popular park where bystanders could be hit. Morse testified in court: “When I first arrived I saw what appeared to be muzzle flash.