San Francisco EMS Say Mob Kept Them From Aiding Victim

It started out as a call about an early morning shooting in San Francisco's Western Addition, nothing too out-of-the-ordinary for an often-troubled neighborhood.

But after that, there was nothing routine about what happened.

Police say a mob prevented officers and paramedics from helping a fatally wounded man -- even engaging in a tug-of-war for his body at one point. Residents in the neighborhood deny they got in the way, but they say they were angry because officers were doing nothing for the victim and appeared to be in no hurry to summon help.

The victim, 23-year-old John Brown, whose family lives in the Western Addition, was found under a truck at 2:40 a.m. Saturday at Larch Way near Laguna Street. He had been shot several times and, police said, was motionless and bleeding heavily.

The first officers who responded said they encountered a hostile crowd of as many as 40 people on the one-way street and that some of them prevented help from getting to Brown.

"It's one of the worst (situations) I've seen,'' said Capt. Kevin Dillon of Northern Station, who said he based his conclusions on his officers' accounts of what happened.

The crowd pushed one officer back when he tried to feel Brown's pulse, Dillon said. When paramedics arrived, some in the crowd grabbed Brown's legs and tried to drag him away, the officer said in his incident report.

Eventually, more than a dozen officers were on the scene trying to control the crowd. Continuous threats were coming from bystanders, Dillon said. Paramedics finally were able to load Brown into an ambulance, but officers first "had to hold the crowd back to make a path," the captain said.

No officers were hurt, and it's difficult to tell whether the delay made any difference in efforts to save Brown's life, Dillon said. Brown was declared dead at the scene at 2:50 a.m.

Sgt. Mikail Ali of the gang task force, who reviewed the police report, said he was dumbfounded by the crowd's response.

"Here the officers were there to help this guy when he was shot,'' he said. "The officers went to render aid, and (people in the crowd) are pulling at the officers, creating skirmish lines and not allowing the officers to get to him.

"It's insanity," he said. "It doesn't make any sense.''

Several Larch Way residents interviewed, however, said it was the officers who had provoked an angry response from the crowd. They accused authorities of misrepresenting what happened.

Robert Williams, who had been staying with family members on Larch Way, called the police version of events bogus and said officers acted insensitively. He said one of the first officers on the scene told bystanders, "That's one for that side, zero for you.''

Williams said no one tried to grab Brown.

"Everybody was scared to touch him," Williams said. "Everybody is scared of the Police Department. There is no way anybody would get in their way.''

He said he and other residents had been angered by what appeared to be a delay in getting medical treatment for Brown.

Otis Harris, who lives on Larch Way, said it took an ambulance nearly 10 minutes to arrive from the time shots were fired. Fire Department officials said they were summoned at 2:45 a.m. and arrived two minutes later.

During the minutes before the ambulance got there, officers stood around and mingled, looking like "they were waiting for the guy to die before they get some help to him,'' Harris said.

"When some of the residents did try to get him from under there, the police told them they were messing with the crime scene," Harris said. "That got people upset -- they didn't try to do anything. When somebody did try to do something, they wanted to turn it into something else.''

Harris said neighbors' anger "really boiled over after the ambulance got there and they had seen he was dead, basically. Then, all of a sudden, (police) started moving fast. They threw him in the back of the ambulance. Nobody administered him CPR, they just put him back in and basically were trying to get him out of there."