We're learning more details about a shooting last Friday in Potrero Hill, and the victim was a teen boy from the Mission whose mother says she doesn't know any reason why anyone would want to hurt him.
The victim in the October 16 shooting, who police initially identified as a "man," has been identified as 17-year-old Rolando Jose Dusuau. His mother, Christina Onopa, writes on a GoFundMe she posted for funeral expenses that he was "smart, funny, driven, and so full of life," and 'his smile could light up any room."
Onopa tells Mission Local that she began to panic Saturday morning after Rolando hadn't returned her texts and calls from the night before and hadn't come home. She thought, "He wouldn’t just take off like this," she tells Mission Local, and so she filed a missing persons reports.
She learned late Saturday night that her eldest boy, who she called RJ, was the victim of a shooting next to the Potrero Hill Terrace and Annex housing project, on the 1100 block of Wisconsin Street. He reported was killed about 13 minutes after he'd left home in the Mission, around 8:38 pm on Friday.
"We don’t know who [shot him] and we don’t know why," Onopa tells Mission Local, adding that RJ was just "an all-around good kid" who was loved by many, and who loved basketball and video games. He was a volunteer counselor at Horizons, a nonprofit for at-risk Latino youth and other youth of color in SF, and at a young age he had already been through a lot, following the suicide of his father three years ago.
The SFPD announced an arrest earlier this week, saying that "homicide investigators served the search warrant on the 1800 block of 25th Street" on Saturday, where they seized evidence and arrested a juvenile suspect in connection with the shooting.
This was San Francisco's 22nd homicide of the year to date, putting the city on par exactly with last year's homicide count at this time. This was also the second homicide this year in and around the Potrero Hill Terrace and Annex housing project, as Mission Local notes. The first occurred in February, with the shooting death fo 44-year-old Cornelius Wigfall Jr.
While an arrest has been made, this is still an active investigation. Anyone with information is asked to call the SFPD tip line at 415-575-4444, or text a tip to TIP411 and begin the message with “SFPD.” Tipsters can remain anonymous.
