We remember Asa

Asa Sullivan was killed on June 6, 2006 when San Francisco Police officers illegally entered his Parkmerced residence without a warrant on a "well-being check" after a neighbor called police to report that she thought the residence might be "a drug house." SFPD officers Michelle Alvis, John Keesor, and Paul Morgado then tracked Sullivan into an attic, escalated the situation into a standoff, and shot him 17 times. Sullivan was Black and Native American and at the time of the killing, twenty-five years old and a father to young child. After an 8 year struggle waged by Sullivan’s family and the community to bring the wrongful death suit to court, the jury refused to award damages, affirming the SFPD defense that though unarmed at the time and spending a quiet evening at home, Sullivan desired “suicide by cop.”

The tri-fold for Justice for Asa and the community safety timeline is meant to be printed and folded. This is a collaborative tool that remembers, counts, mourns, and honors our dead, making visible the many resistances that have refused erasure. This refusal itself is a confrontation against the multiple state violences directed at the community. The timeline relies on local knowledges and the circuits of struggle where details and critical information are circulated among us. It reflects our ongoing commitment to each other to continue to gather in streets, parks, community centers, taquerias, pubs, and cafes to share what we know while also elaborating the strategies and practices of militarized policing and control that are aimed at us, department by department, program by program, across the state. In this way, we hope to collectively map for ourselves across communities the low intensity war organized against us and in service of capital’s current racial regime.

Justice for Asa Sullivan, the People's Investigation for Asa Sullivan, and Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy