Three Shootings in Four Days on the Same Two Blocks of Market Street
Four bystanders were shot on the 900 block of Market on July 25. Two more shootings followed within days, and SFPD's response patrol ends today.
Four men were shot on the 900 block of Market Street just before 1 a.m. on Saturday, July 25, after they tried to break up an argument between a man and a woman near the corner of Mason. The gunman fired on all four, then disappeared into the early-morning crowd. Police have not identified him, and no arrest has been announced.
Two days later, on Monday afternoon, officers patrolling two blocks west at Market and Jones heard gunfire. One man was hit and taken to a hospital with life-threatening injuries. A third shooting on the same stretch happened that Friday.
Three shootings, four days, roughly two blocks of the same street. That compression is what moved the department from responding to each incident to treating the corridor itself as the problem.
What police have said
San Francisco Police Chief Derrick Lew announced on July 29 that the department would run round-the-clock patrols through Mid-Market until August 3, drawing in tactical and traffic units alongside the officers regularly assigned to the district. Lew said investigators are confident the three shootings are not connected to one another, and that detectives have leads in each.
That distinction matters more than it might sound. A linked series implies a dispute between known parties that can be interrupted by arresting the right people. Three unrelated shootings on the same two blocks in four days implies something harder to fix: a place where ordinary arguments escalate to gunfire at an unusual rate.
The Monday shooting has produced the clearest result so far. According to an SFPD release, officers who heard the shots identified three suspects and detained two of them the same evening after a brief foot chase outside an apartment building on the 100 block of Waller Street. Donovan Redmond Hayes, 22, was booked on attempted murder along with multiple firearm and ammunition charges and an outstanding Alameda County warrant. Deandre Gippson, 30, was booked on possession of ammunition by a felon and possession of methamphetamine. A third man, Terry Brown, 26, was arrested the following afternoon on the 5400 block of Third Street on charges including assault with a firearm.
The July 25 case, the one with four victims, remains open.
The stretch of street in question
The 900 block of Market sits at one of the busiest pedestrian junctions in the city. Powell Street Station empties onto it. The cable car turnaround is a block away. Hotels, chain retail, and a steady flow of visitors share the sidewalk with a neighborhood that has absorbed the city's hardest problems for decades. Mid-Market is where San Francisco's tourist economy and its street crisis are separated by about twenty feet of pavement.
Jonathan Cutrer, who lives nearby, told KTVU that the character of the block changes with the clock. "Nighttime after 10 p.m. it starts getting hectic," he said. "People coming from other areas."
That description matches the timing of the July 25 shooting, which happened in the small hours on a night when downtown was busier than usual ahead of the San Francisco Marathon. It does not match the Monday shooting, which happened at about 3 p.m. on a weekday afternoon, in daylight, close enough to a patrol that officers heard the shots themselves.
What the four victims were doing
The detail that has drawn the most attention is that all four men shot on July 25 were bystanders. They were not party to the dispute. They stepped toward a man and a woman who were arguing, and the man produced a gun.
Public safety messaging in San Francisco, as in most cities, generally encourages people not to walk past a confrontation. Intervening in a street argument is the kind of thing neighbors are asked to do. Four people did it and all four were shot for it, which is a difficult outcome to file anywhere useful. It is also the reason this particular case has stayed in circulation longer than a typical Mid-Market shooting report.
Police have not released the victims' conditions.
A surge that ends today
The Mid-Market patrol increase Lew announced was scoped to end August 3. Saturation policing of a specific corridor is a familiar tool and a genuinely effective one while it is running. Gunfire tends to move rather than stop, and the surge does not come with a stated plan for what follows it.
The city has cycled through versions of this before: an incident or cluster draws a visible deployment, the deployment holds for a period measured in days or weeks, and the underlying conditions on the block are unchanged when it lifts. Whether this round is different will be legible in September, not this week.
For now the open question is the July 25 case. Four men were shot by someone who has not been identified, nine days ago, in one of the most heavily surveilled and most heavily trafficked blocks in San Francisco.
Anyone with information is asked to call the SFPD tip line at (415) 575-4444 or to text a tip to TIP411, beginning the message with "SFPD." Tips may be left anonymously.
Reporting in this article draws on statements from the San Francisco Police Department, and on coverage by KTVU and Local News Matters.