Salt Lake City police say a demonstrator who was shot at the city's “No Kings” protest has died and that the bullet that killed him appears to have been fired by one of the demonstration's peacekeepers.

A man who was believed to be part of a peacekeeping team for the “No Kings” protest in Salt Lake City shot at a person who was brandishing a rifle at demonstrators, striking both the rifleman and a bystander who later died at the hospital, authorities said Sunday.

Police took the alleged rifleman, Arturo Gamboa, 24, into custody Saturday evening on a murder charge, Salt Lake City Police Chief Brian Redd said at a Sunday news conference. The bystander was Arthur Folasa Ah Loo, 39, a fashion designer from Samoa.

Detectives don’t yet know why Gamboa pulled out a rifle or ran from the peacekeepers, but they accused him of creating the dangerous situation that led to Ah Loo’s death. The Associated Press did not immediately find an attorney listed for Gamboa or contact information for his family in public records.

  • Zak@lemmy.world
    10·
    18 hours ago

    Volunteers were told not to carry a weapon because of outcomes like this.

    Let’s try out the counterfactual: the assailant pulls out a rifle, aims it into the crowd, and nobody else in the immediate vicinity is armed. What happens next?

    There’s a small chance he was just trying to scare people and disrupt the protest, but that sounds like the prelude to a mass shooting to me. It’s likely many more people would have died in that case. We can’t know of course and neither could the security volunteer; he had to make a hard decision in a split second in an emergency. He had to weigh the risk of shooting when he did against the risk of waiting, and he had the disadvantage of fighting a rifle with a pistol; it’s much easier to shoot accurately with a rifle, and the ammunition is more deadly.

    • Glide@lemmy.ca
      76·
      17 hours ago

      The dude with the rifle was running. That whole argument is fine when someone is draw weapons and making threats, but they shot at someone trying to flee the scene after causing no harm and killed an innocent. Everything else is imaginary justification.

      EDIT: Wondering where the hell everyone else got so much more information, I reloaded the article, scrolled past the ad wall and found the rest of the text, which makes clear that the dude with the rifle pulled his gun into a firing position on the crowd. Fair enough, I was wrong and the citizen was right to have taken the shot. I blame the ad wall for convincing me that the news article was over.

      • Zak@lemmy.world
        1·
        8 hours ago

        I reloaded the article, scrolled past the ad wall and found the rest of the text

        That explains the confusion. Do you need a recommendation for an ad blocker?

      • Zak@lemmy.world
        7·
        16 hours ago

        According to the reports I’ve read, including in the toplevel article here, the sequence of events is:

        1. The rifleman separated from the crowd
        2. The rifleman pulled a rifle out of a bag
        3. The rifleman ran toward the crowd with the rifle in a firing posiition and pointed toward people
        4. The security volunteer fired three shots with a pistol, striking the rifleman and a bystander
        5. The rifleman dropped his rifle and fled

        It’s easy to conflate running with fleeing, but running toward a group of people with a rifle pointed at them is charging, not fleeing.