Officer’s gun adds odd twist to killing
Revelation shocks, angers S.F. victim’s co-worker
The killing last month of Abel Enrique Esquivel Jr. in San Francisco’s Mission District provoked anguish at a community center where the 23-year-old had interned over the summer, working with young people in need of the same kind of mentoring he had received from the group when he was a teenager.
But a new police account of how Esquivel died — gunned down on the street a block from his home by a teenage robber who wore a GPS anklet and was armed with a gun that had been stolen from a city police officer’s personal car — prompted shock and anger on Thursday.
“The fact that the bullet that killed Abel came
from a police officer’s gun is a really hard thing to digest,” said Lariza Dugan Cuadra, executive director of the Central American Resource Center, known as CARECEN SF, which is located on Mission and Cesar Chavez streets just blocks from where the young man was slain Aug. 15. “It’s unacceptable and it pains us.”
Dugan Cuadra spoke as the three alleged killers, all city residents who were arrested this week, were arraigned in San Francisco Superior Court. Erick Garcia Pineda and Daniel Cruz, both 18, and Jesus Perez-Araujo, 24, face a slate of charges including murder and are being held in jail without bail. Each pleaded not guilty.
According to a complaint filed by the district attorney’s office, Perez-Araujo served as the driver the night Esquivel was killed, as the three men cruised the city, looking for targets to rob. After midnight they held up three people, and encountered Esquivel about 2 a.m. at 26th Street and South Van Ness Avenue, authorities said. Pineda is accused of firing the fatal bullet.
At the time, Pineda was wearing a GPS tracker that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had strapped to his ankle, and data from the monitor is evidence in the case, according to law enforcement sources familiar with the matter. A spokesman for ICE, which uses GPS monitors in a variety of cases, said the agency could not comment.
Esquivel, a San Francisco native who grew up in the Mission District, had apparently just gotten off work at a market. He staggered for a block before responding police officers and paramedics found him and took him to a hospital, where he died.
Three days earlier, on Aug. 12, Perez-Araujo and Pineda stole a silver .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver as well as ammunition from a car that belonged to San Francisco police Officer Marvin Cabuntala, according to the court complaint filed Thursday.
Police Department officials would not elaborate on the circumstances of the theft. They did not say where the vehicle was parked, what time of day it was burglarized, whether the car was locked, and where the gun had been stored. There was no indication Thursday that the gun had been recovered after the slaying.
Martin Halloran, the president of the police officers’ union, said the officer did not know his vehicle had been broken into until after the shooting. “There were no visible signs of the burglary,” Halloran said. “The officer, a highly decorated veteran, is devastated.”
Department officials said they opened an internal investigation into the theft, which could lead to discipline for the officer.
A San Francisco police bulletin in October 2015 states that officers should keep a gun “on their person” when they are in public. If forced to leave a firearm in an unattended vehicle “for a short period of time,” they must secure the weapon in the locked trunk, out of public view.
“If a member is unable to secure a firearm in a vehicle as described above, the member shall not leave a firearm in an unattended vehicle,” the bulletin states. “Under no circumstances shall any firearm be left unattended in a vehicle overnight.”
“We want this officer to be reprimanded,” Dugan Cuadra said. “We intend to follow up with that and make sure the Police Department is held accountable for this irresponsible act.”
Guns stolen from law enforcement vehicles have been used in a number of shootings in recent years in the Bay Area. In 2015, a gun stolen in San Francisco from a car belonging to a U.S. Bureau of Land Management agent was used to kill Kathryn Steinle, 32, on Pier 14. The shooting led to the police bulletin on handling guns, which was issued by former Chief Greg Suhr.
A few months later, a gun stolen from a U.S. immigration agent’s rental car in San Francisco was used to kill Antonio Ramos, 27, as he painted an antiviolence mural in Oakland.
The new San Francisco case “really shows irresponsible behavior, and to me, behavior without any expectation of accountability or responsibility in the end,” state Sen. Jerry Hill, D-San Mateo, said Thursday.
Hill authored a bill that was signed into law last year that requires law enforcement officers to pay fines of $1,000 if they fail to lock up their guns in unattended vehicles — a rule civilians have had to follow for some time. He called for the San Francisco district attorney’s office to consider charging the officer with the infraction, as did Deputy Public Defender Kwixuan Maloof, who is representing Perez-Araujo.
“Guns stolen from vehicles put everybody in danger, and no one knows this better than the police,” Maloof said. “If that police officer did not secure his gun, he should be accountable, just like everybody else would be accountable.”
Ed Obayashi, a deputy sheriff and certified law enforcement trainer, said that since Hill’s bill became law he has been teaching officers throughout the state about the need to secure firearms. What he’s found, he said, is that officers are around guns so routinely that the weapons become just another tool on their belt.
“The gun is heavy and jamming into their sides, so they’ll take it out and put it in the glove box and say, ‘Oh I’m just going to go in to get a cup of coffee or drop something off,’ ” Obayashi said.
“And then they forget about it. Is there an element of carelessness? Of course,” he said. “But I hope there will be a considerable reduction in these types of thefts. It’s beyond the $1,000 fine. It’s the embarrassment more than anything else. And officers are learning that they can be legally liable should that stolen gun be used in a crime.”
Esquivel came to the Central American Resource Center through its Second Chance youth program. The organization works with young people who face a variety of challenges, from trouble in school to neighborhood violence.
“He was an exceptional young person,” Dugan Cuadra said. “He was a young man of few words, but when he opened his mouth, he dropped knowledge. He reflected, in his own growth and stories, the growth that we want to see in the young people that come through our programs.”
Esquivel, who was born in the United States to parents who had fled military conflicts in El Salvador, recently traveled to Nicaragua with other members of the program. The trip — known as Raices or “roots” in English — was designed to be the culmination of years of work by young people becoming leaders.
Before returning, Esquivel and others on the trip gave their nicest clothing and shoes to the impoverished citizens they visited, Dugan Cuadra said.
“Any loss of a young person is a deep loss to our community,” she said. “It hurts even more when you know that young person has overcome so many barriers and is well on their path to a healthy successful, thriving life.”
San Francisco Chronicle staff writer Susana Guerrero
contributed to this story.