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The story of four boys, one wrongful accusation, and a cycle of violence that outlasted every attempt to stop it.
It was still hot outside when Luis Alberto Quiñonez—whom everyone called Sito—reached Grant Avenue, in San Francisco’s Chinatown, around 6:30 p.m. on Sunday, September 8, 2019. His girlfriend Arianna’s mother had been evicted that day, and Sito had spent several hours helping her move.
Leaving her new apartment, Sito had just put his blinkers on to make a right turn on Brunswick when he saw a light flash on his dashboard. “Oh, man!” he said to Arianna. “I need to get some air.”
Sito pulled over by a fence on a street of small houses. While his car idled, a person in a hooded sweatshirt stepped up to the Nissan’s driver’s-side window. In an instant, he raised an automatic pistol to the glass and started firing.
By the time the shooter finished, twenty-one cartridges littered Sito’s Nissan, inside and out. Seventeen of those bullets cut through Sito’s neck, shoulder, chest, and stomach. Arianna took two bullets in her own arm.
The person who pulled the trigger had been following them for some time, just lying in wait.
Sito was my stepson’s half-brother. I am sure he would not have considered me a part of his life. But in death he has become a part of mine.
Sito: An American Teenager and the City that Failed Him is an intimate encounter with grief that aims to transform my own field of scholarly study into painful lived experience. The central question of my ethnography is: When a life is extinguished by street violence, how does a victim’s family psychologically heal from homicide?
As a gang scholar, I have been aware of the adverse effects of incarcerating youth for a long time. But it was not until Sito’s murder that I fully grasped how worthless a victim’s family can feel in the face of the criminal justice system, especially if that system has treated them and their loved ones as perpetrators in the past.
In 2014, when he was fourteen years old, Sito was accused of murdering his former classmate—a boy named Rashawn. Sito spent five months in the San Francisco Juvenile Hall while the district attorney decided whether or not to try him as an adult.
The tide turned for Sito when a private investigator who had been retracing his footsteps on the day that Rashawn was murdered uncovered surveillance footage of the attack. The footage clearly showed that Sito did not kill Rashawn.
The district attorney dropped the charges against Sito and he was released. But that murder allegation would haunt Sito for the rest of his life. Much of the hardships that Sito faced in life happened after the charges against him for Rashawn’s murder were dropped, and he enrolled in a new school, where he was expected to simply forget the traumas of his past and move on with his life.
Back when Sito languished behind bars, he could never have imagined that there were things in his life from the inside that he would miss on the outside. Little things—such as safety mirrors positioned in the corners where the walls meet the ceiling. If there’s no way to see who’s behind me, Sito probably thought, how can I protect myself? His vulnerability surfaced at the Envision Academy of Arts and Technology, the charter school he attended after his 2015 release.
Sito wanted to control his new school life in a way he couldn’t while he was incarcerated.
Still, it was difficult for him to make friends, and school stressed him out. He had always felt controlled, afraid, and punished there. In his landmark ethnography, Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys, the renowned sociologist, Victor Rios, wrote about the ways that teachers, administrators, and school counselors treat Black and Latino boys as deviant, threatening, and risky.
After conducting hundreds of interviews with Black and Latino boys in Oakland, Rios found that school is a key site of criminalization for urban youth. Says Rios, “Criminalization left these marginalized young people very few choices, crime and violence being some of the few resources for feeling dignity and empowerment.”
Like the teenage boys in Rios’s study, Sito was trying to improve his life. He wanted to veer from the path he was on, but it wasn’t easy for him. He wore a hard shell of armor because he expected students and teachers not to like him.
“He steered clear of me for my entire freshman year,” said Sito’s former Envision classmate, Tavin.
During that time, the kids at school kept telling Tavin, “Sito don’t like you.” And they were telling Sito the same thing about Tavin.
Sito and Tavin had grown accustomed to giving each other cold stares and dirty looks from across the hall, but they both kept their distance.
“If we ever got into an argument,” Tavin said, “I just knew we were going to fight.”
The following year, the teenage boys were assigned to the same homeroom. Their teacher told them to sit next to each other. And before long, she handed out an assignment that would be due at the end of the semester.
Tavin called the teacher over to ask her a question that he was hesitant to ask in front of everyone else. That’s when Sito heard Tavin. “Can’t I do something else? I don’t like to read,” he said.
Tavin watched his teacher’s mouth tighten into a scowl. “No. You can’t,” she said. “Is that it?”
When the teacher left, Sito brought his chair close to Tavin’s desk.
“You really don’t like books?” Sito asked. “I’m not calling you dumb,” he continued, “but there’s some good ones out there.” A pause. “I can tell you some of my favorites if you want.”
Once Tavin nodded his head, Sito began to rattle off his list, describing the characters and plot for each book he mentioned. Afterward, Tavin settled on My Bloody Life: The Making of a Latin King, by Reymundo Sanchez.
“I was never interested in reading anything, ever, until he told me about that book.”
From that day forward, Tavin had a loyal friend. Their teacher’s dismissive response uncovered the bridge that had been connecting the two boys all along.
Tavin was one among Sito’s friends who was grateful that his sharp edges dulled over time. Still, his problems never completely went away.
After his release, Sito’s mother, Beatriz, would say, “You’ve been in the house all day; I know you want some fresh air.” She remembers Sito’s reply, “It’s not about what I want, Mom. I’m afraid something might happen to me while . . . while I’m with you.”
“So we would go to places far away,” Beatriz told me. “And even then, he was always looking over his shoulder. He wasn’t able to focus on what he was doing or who he was with.”
The research bears this out. Several scholars have reported that incarcerated adolescents and teenagers such as Sito experience PTSD at a rate eight times higher than their peers who have never been incarcerated. Hypervigilance, nightmares, phobias, and paranoia outlast a young person’s time in juvenile hall. And if the trauma is never adequately processed, it can rewire the brain, affecting thoughts and behavior later in life.
If there was any doubt that Sito’s anxiety and fear were justified, it was erased on December 9, 2015. Almost a year after Sito’s release, Miguel, the boy who stabbed
Rashawn, was shot dead.
In the days after Miguel’s murder, Sito logged on to Instagram, as he did countless times a day. He saw a Mission Local headline that read, “Memorial Honors 17‑year‑old Killed on Outskirts of SF Mission.”
Another person tagged Sito’s profile to the post so that every time one of Rashawn’s friends “liked” the announcement, Sito was notified. He was also informed every time someone left a comment, one of which nearly brought Sito to tears.
It said: “1 down. 1 to go.”
How did Miguel’s enemies find him before the police did? The San Francisco Police Department had video footage of Miguel stabbing Rashawn, so it remains confounding.
The more I thought about it, the more I was tempted to believe Sito’s father, Rene, who said the SFPD never intended to arrest Miguel. “Street justice,” he told me, “was the outcome they preferred.”
Sito’s teachers at Envision didn’t know about Miguel, so they assumed the worst was over. They tried to reassure him that he would overcome his past. They told him many times, and in many ways, that they could see him on the horizon, sailing back to shore. Then those same adults shook their heads in dismay when a high wind caused a wave to capsize his boat.
Sito never made it back to safety.
In 2019, five years after Sito was wrongfully accused of killing Rashawn outside of a San Francisco corner store, he would be murdered by Julius—Rashawn’s younger brother. Julius was twelve when his brother was killed, and seventeen when he walked up to the driver’s-side window of Sito’s car and killed him.
Beatriz still doesn’t leave the house without looking over her shoulder. She learned it from her son, who learned it from a jail cell no one should have put a fourteen-year-old in—the same kind of cell where Julius sits now, with mirrors bolted into the corners so he can always see what’s behind him.
This is what—and this is who—the system leaves behind.
Kathryn Wright is the section contributing editor for the Council on Anthropology and Education.