Tribute to officer whose ’94 slaying led to new laws
As two dozen police officers stood at attention, the mournful strains of a bagpipe echoed at the corner of Pine and Franklin streets on Saturday night at a memorial for a San Francisco Police Department officer killed at that spot 27 years ago during a horrific gunbattle with a heavily armed carjacking suspect.
The Police Department and his family pay tribute every year to SFPD Officer James Guelff, a 10-year department veteran who left behind two young children and died at age 40.
His children, Landon and Laura, now grown and with children of their own, spoke at the memorial about their funloving father. “He was rambunctious, always first on the scene, enthusiastic,” said Landon Guelff.
Lt. Jason Sawyer, acting
captain of the Northern Police Station, where Office Guelff served, also spoke.
“He served with bravery, integrity and the type of honor legends are made of,” Sawyer
said.
The bloody rampage that took Guelff ’s life wounded another officer, a paramedic and a passerby on Nov. 13, 1994. A small bronze plaque on the sidewalk on the north side of Pine Street marks the location where Guelff fell after firing his service weapon. He was the first officer to respond to a “shots fired” report at the location.
The perpetrator, ex-con Vic Lee Boutwell, was armed with two assault rifles, a Glock handgun, a Colt semiautomatic pistol and an Uzi semiautomatic, and had hundreds of rounds of ammunition. He was wearing a Kevlar armor suit and an armored helmet that allowed him to withstand a half-hour gunbattle with police, until a SWAT team finally shot him to death. The quiet lower Pacific Heights neighborhood was turned into a war zone, with bullet holes riddling nearby buildings.
The tragedy prompted the city to give its police force more powerful weapons and better body armor. It impelled national legislation sponsored by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., that banned convicted felons from wearing protective armor, enhanced penalties for violent offenses while wearing protective armor, and required the federal government to give its surplus protective vests to local police agencies. Similar laws were enacted in California and a dozen other states.
Lee Guelff, Officer Guelff’s older brother, spent years campaigning to get the legislation enacted.
“It is not fair for us to ask you to protect us, and to have you go out there outgunned and out-armored,” he said to the assembled officers.
Guelff ’s kidneys, liver and heart were donated for transplants.