Cruising By 'Suede,' One Night Before Shooting Rampage

By Lois Beckett Mon., Feb. 8 2010 at 10:45 AM

Officer Derrick August had been thinking about Suede since his shift began at 10 p.m.. It was the first thing he mentioned as he pulled the patrol car away from the Central Police Station Friday night: they needed to keep an eye on 383 Bay. Hip-hop artist The Jacka was scheduled to appear, and the crowd he attracted might cause trouble. Not that August didn't appreciate The Jacka, whose first album, with local act Mob Figaz out of Pittsburg, made Billboard's Top-100 list for hip-hop/R&B. But Suede was one of the neighborhood's problem clubs, and this would definitely be a crowd to watch.

Police officers' worries about violence at the Suede nightclub, sadly, were not off the mark

I was doing a ride-along with the police on Friday night,so I spent most of the evening in a patrol car. As San Francisco police districts go, Central is pretty mellow. It includes the Financial District, Chinatown, North Beach, and Fisherman's Wharf, which means a lot of restaurants and a lot of tourists. There's a large proportion of senior police officers at Central; it's a good place to be if you're no longer interested in the kind of excitement you get working in Bayview or the Mission. The major source of excitement in Central is the stretch of strip clubs on Broadway.

August's partner Friday night was Josh Nazzal, a rookie officer who had recently started his year-long probation period at Central. The first time they drove past Suede, the line outside the door looked pretty docile, and the officers had other calls coming in. A body had been discovered in a Chinatown apartment -- an old man, it turned out, who had died alone in his room. A neighbor had heard screaming in an apartment and was worried about child abuse. August and Nazzal dealt with the calls and kept circling around the neighborhood. They took a swing around Coit Tower, where couples admiring the skyline eyed them nervously. Later, they paused to make sure the drunk guy who had collapsed in a doorway was going to be okay. He started to come around as they waited: The man's friend told the officers that the drunk fellow had just quaffed 5 Adios Motherfuckers in an hour. "Ehn. It's a rainy Friday," the friend said.

Back in front of Suede, it was well past midnight, and the crowed was pushing at the door. There was another patrol car there already, and an officer on the street taking stock of the situation. Apparently, The Jacka had canceled, but that didn't mean the people who bought tickets would get their money back. The officer on the scene remarked sourly to August and Nazzal about all the "clown cars" that were parked around the club. He was not impressed by the rims sported by Suede's clientele.

It was cold, and there had already been spots of rain, so August and Nazzal headed back to the station for their jackets and riot gear. Maybe something was going to happen on a rainy Friday after all. They went down to their lockers and emerged with intimidating helmets and extra-long batons. As we drove to Suede, they told me I should stay inside the car.

But the rain was pounding more heavily now, and by the time we got to Suede, the crowd had melted away. There were a few people inside the door of the club, and more taking shelter inside the parking garage across the street. We watched a girl in a white T-shirt and sexy slashed leggings dash across the street.

After thinking about Suede all evening, August wasn't ready to give up yet. He had Nazzal run the license plate number of the car in front of them through the computer to check for any violations. It was clean. They checked another. Also clean. It was going to be a quiet Friday night after all.

August wasn't working on Saturday night, when promoter Scarlett Rumor did a party at Suede with rapper Erk Tha Jerk, whose Twitter feed syncs with the news reports. Around 1:40 Sunday morning, a fight inside Suede spilled out onto the street and escalated into a shootout. "Tweetin from a shoot out :-/ wowzers...." the rapper wrote, and then 20 minutes later, "No joke!! Niggas is out here dying!! Please pray for these people..." Four men were wounded, two of them critically, and one, 19-year-old Lawon Hall of Richmond, died. The gunman was shot by a San Francisco Patrol Special officer, and is also in the hospital. I called Nazzal, who was on duty Saturday night, but he said he couldn't comment about the Suede shooting.