30 shots

There will be no ridiculous embellishments in this blog post, and the witty remarks will be kept to a minimum. This is the true story of the day that changed my San Francisco neighborhood.

Monday, August 14, 2006. I was spending a lazy summer day to myself in the apartment. It was shortly after 3 p.m. when I heard it. 

Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! One after the other; 30 in total. It sounded like firecrackers. 4^th of July was awhile ago, I thought to myself.

I didn’t think anything of it the rest of the day. I can’t even remember hearing the sirens. It wasn’t until I read the paper the following morning that I realized what had happened.

A 17-year-old high school basketball player, whose dream was to work with kids, was hit with 30 rounds of automatic fire. The shooting occurred approximately three blocks from our apartment. His name was Aubrey.

Those weren’t firecrackers I heard. It was the sound of a young man dying – murdered in the street. Crime was a familiar friend to my neighborhood, but murder was a stranger.

In the months that followed there was a noticeable increase in police activity. A neighborhood that was once largely ignored by law enforcement now saw patrol cars sweeping through every day. 

Dealers were arrested in the street. The building next to our own was raided just a week after the shooting. The Screamer was arrested for vigilantism (OK, that makes one ridiculous embellishment. I don’t know what actually happened to The Screamer and his son). 

This instituted a changing of the guard in my neighborhood. With many of the troublemaking tenants now in jail, landlords and real estate agents had to find new tenants. The clientele that swarmed in over the coming years was far different than the previous locals. Gentrification kicked in.

It isn’t fully gentrified, however. Some elements of the old neighborhood remain. The area still has a certain dinginess to it, but the criminal element is gone.

(CrazyBeard is still around. In fact, he hasn’t aged a day. I think he’s mystically connected to this place and will never die so long as he lives here.)

The dramatic climax to this transformation came in the fall of 2009 when the local meth lab blew-up. I can still remember my father’s phone call. The first words out of his mouth were, “The pink house is on fire!” I knew exactly which one he meant. The police presence slowly declined after that, as crime in the area drastically decreased.

But Aubrey’s killers were never found. No suspects named, no arrests made, no substantial evidence found. All the activity and investigating into the area’s general criminal activity turned up nothing in regards to the murder that sparked everything.

To this day, there is a $250,000 reward for any information related to the shooting. Flyers advertising the reward exist on the street corner where Aubrey was shot. A memorial to Aubrey sits adjacent to a nearby daycare. A small placard on it reads in large bold letters, “JUSTICE DELAYED IS JUSTICE DENIED.”

I didn’t know Aubrey. Odds are we crossed paths plenty of times in the street, but I couldn’t have picked him out of a crowd before all this. Now I see his face every day. Every time I walk down that street, I am reminded of his death and the ongoing wait for justice.

Hearing someone murdered – hearing, not even actually witnessing it – is a sobering occurrence. Magnified by the fact that I thought it was a harmless event. “Just someone shooting off firecrackers,” I said to myself so long ago.

I still feel guilty about that.

Sometimes I think to myself, maybe if I had reacted and investigated the noise. If I had walked down to where the shooting had occurred, maybe I would have seen the shooters and could have identified them to police. But I didn’t.

Justice delayed is justice denied.