At about eight-ten on an unusually hot and sultry Monday evening a couple of weeks before the Fourth of July, Michael Mullen, a thirty-nine-year-old white accountant with a wife and three children all under eight, stopped his new black Honda Prelude at the corner of 19th and Dolores in the outer Noe Valley District of San Francisco. Dolores is a divided street with a wide grassy area occasionally pocked with trees between the north and south lanes.

According to witnesses, a young black male was walking in this divider strip when Mullen pulled up to the stop sign at 19th. The driver immediately behind Mullen, a kid named Josh Cane, noticed that, with the heat, Mullen had his driver's window open, his elbow sticking out resting on it.

The young man in the divider strip, who'd been walking north, the same direction both Mullen and Cane had been driving, closed the remaining feet between himself and Mullen in a couple of athletic bounds, 'like he was jumping over some mud or something.' (Rayanne Jonas, fifty-six, an African-American day-care provider, walking home from the center on Army, where she worked.)

'I saw he was already holding something, which then, I mean at that time, I thought was a pipe, and then I realized.'

It turned out it was a gun, which the man stuck into Mullen's temple. He pulled the trigger. The report was loud enough that Cane – in his car with his windows up and his air conditioner blasting – heard it 'like a crack of thunder.'