San Francisco's homicide count seems headed for its highest in recent years, following a shooting in one of the city's public housing developments.
According to the San Francisco Police Department, a 20-year-old man was shot at 10:18 p.m. Tuesday night on the 1600 block of Sunnydale Avenue, an address inside San Francisco’s largest public housing site, the Sunnydale-Velasco development.
Police released few details on the slaying, saying only that the victim was dead when they arrived. As of publication time, the SFPD says that no arrests have been made.
When contacted by SFist, a spokesperson with the San Francisco Medical Examiner's Office said that they did not have any information to release on the victim as of Wednesday morning.
An SFPD spokesperson tells SFist that this slaying marks San Francisco's 49th 48th homicide (Update 11:05 a.m.: that same SFPD spokesperson called SFist to say that she was mistaken and the number as of this morning was 48, not 49 as she previously stated ) in a year that seems poised to exceed recent records for that crime. In 2016, SF ended with 59 homicides, there were 53 in 2015, 45 in 2014, 48 in 2013, 68 in 2012, and 50 in 2011.
When asked about the rising count by the SF Examiner last week, when the number was still at 45, SFPD Chief Bill Scott acknowledged the statistics, saying “Even taking out the tragedy at UPS, we are still up."
“We know some [homicides] are gang-related, but many of them are not," Scott said. "Many of them are just people that had disputes that got out of hand and resulted in loss of life.”
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