A man riding a scooter was killed Monday in SoMa as he fled San Francisco police officers along Mission Street and then hit his head on the metal pole of a bus shelter, according to police and six witnesses.
Three witnesses described a man, potentially an undercover agent, cutting off the fleeing suspect’s scooter with a gray sedan, getting out of his car and then tackling the suspect, whose head hit the metal pole of a Muni shelter at Eighth and Mission streets. One of the witnesses called it a “football tackle.”
The suspect then lay on the ground, bleeding, while police tried to help him, according to witnesses, and he was taken to hospital.
The police department said officers spotted a man they said was wanted on an arrest warrant near Mission and Eighth streets around 11:24 a.m. When officers attempted to arrest him, San Francisco police reported he fled on the scooter and “collided with a street light.”
Police officers came to his aid and paramedics took him to a hospital, the department said, where he was pronounced dead.
Police did not release the man’s name or say why he was wanted. An SFPD spokesperson would not say whether the gray car was an unmarked police vehicle or comment on witness accounts, and would not comment further on an open and ongoing investigation.
Bystanders said the gray sedan chased the scooter down Mission Street before cutting it off. They said the man on the scooter went against the flow of traffic before being blocked by the vehicle.
It was then that the suspect was approached by a man who got out of the vehicle, according to witnesses, and hit the metal pole.
By early afternoon, police had recorded Mission between Seventh and Eighth streets. An hour after the incident, police were still on scene, photographing the area and marking the sidewalk with chalk. A white van from the medical examiner’s office was on scene.
An email to the medical examiner has not yet been returned.
This is a developing story and will be updated with new information
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