{"id":489848,"date":"2026-10-09T01:30:17","date_gmt":"2026-10-09T01:30:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/489848\/"},"modified":"2026-10-09T01:30:17","modified_gmt":"2026-10-09T01:30:17","slug":"sf-public-defender-pushes-to-decertify-3-police-officers-whose-arrest-left-man-in-coma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/489848\/","title":{"rendered":"SF Public Defender Pushes to Decertify 3 Police Officers Whose Arrest Left Man in Coma"},"content":{"rendered":"

Body camera footage showed the three officers punching Gibson, pulling his hair and kneeling on his neck \u2014 after which Gibson was medically induced into a coma and intubated. <\/p>\n

Oct 8, 2026<\/p>\n

Updated 5:05 pm PT<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Kevon Gibson, 33, is treated in a hospital’s intensive care unit following his arrest by San Francisco Police officers Brendan Caraway, Brian Conway, and Gabriel Rivera on Aug. 17, 2025. The San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, who represented Gibson at trial in August, released the footage of his arrest at a press conference Thursday.
\n
\n\u00a0(Courtesy of San Francisco Public Defender)<\/p>\n

The San Francisco Public Defender\u2019s Office<\/a> is seeking to decertify three San Francisco Police officers, alleging they so brutally injured a man that he had to be medically induced into a coma.\u00a0<\/p>\n

During a press conference at the public defender\u2019s office on Thursday, attorneys presented body camera footage from Aug. 17, 2025, in which San Francisco police officers Brendan Caraway, Brian Conway and Gabriel Rivera tackled 33-year-old Kevon Gibson to the ground.<\/p>\n

They repeatedly punched him in the head, pulled his hair, and kneeled on his neck in the hallway of a residential hotel on Sixth Street.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m scared right now,\u201d Gibson told the officers as they laid on top of him and struck him.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Gibson repeatedly told the officers, \u201cI can\u2019t breathe,\u201d words which Public Defender Mano Raju said were also the last by Eric Garner, who was killed in New York police custody in 2014. One officer also knelt on Gibson\u2019s neck, the way George Floyd was murdered<\/a> by police in 2020.<\/p>\n

\"\"The San Francisco Public Defender\u2019s Office released footage of the Aug. 17, 2025 arrest of 33-year-old Kevon Gibson, who was hospitalized after San Francisco Police officers Brendan Caraway, Brian Conway and Gabriel Rivera tackled and punched him and knelt on his neck.\u00a0(Courtesy of San Francisco Public Defender’s Office)<\/p>\n

Gibson was treated in the ICU, put into a medically induced coma and intubated, before being held at the San Francisco County Jail for a year \u2014 awaiting trial for three felony counts of resisting arrest.<\/p>\n

Deputy public defenders Bonnie Chan-Silen and John Paul Passaglia represented Gibson in the case, where a San Francisco jury acquitted him of all three charges.<\/p>\n

Although Gibson was acquitted of the three felony counts, the jury still convicted him of being a felon in possession of a firearm and three misdemeanor counts of resisting arrest.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Gibson was sentenced last month. He was given credit for the year he served in jail, and the judge allowed him to serve the remaining 17 days of his sentence in home detention, at the residence of a loved one.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Chan-Silen said the DA\u2019s office attempted to keep the jury from hearing audio from the body camera, but the jury heard his cries for help.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat makes this horrific police beating even more egregious is the way the district attorney\u2019s office tried to cover it up, and charge Mr. Gibson with crimes that he did not commit,\u201d Chan-Silen said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"San Francisco Deputy Public Defender Bonnie Chan-Silen takes questions from reporters at a press conference at the public defender\u2019s office on Oct. 8, 2026. The office released footage of the Aug. 17, 2025 arrest of 33-year-old Kevon Gibson, who was hospitalized after San Francisco Police officers Brendan Caraway, Brian Conway and Gabriel Rivera tackled and punched him, as well as knelt on his neck. A jury found Gibson guilty of three counts of misdemeanor resisting arrest and being a felon in possession of a firearm, but acquitted him of three felony resisting charges.\u00a0(Brian Krans\/KQED)<\/p>\n

In a statement, the district attorney\u2019s office said it never asked the court to exclude the footage.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe jury convicted Mr. Gibson of four crimes. Calling this a \u2018cover-up\u2019 isn\u2019t just an attack on our prosecutors\u2014it shows remarkable disrespect for the court and the jurors who heard the evidence and rendered the verdict,\u201d the statement said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Passaglia alleged the officers were caught in three lies at trial: One said Gibson bit him and another said Gibson punched him in the face multiple times, and even took his radio off and wrapped the cord around his neck. The third claim was that Gibson attempted to break his thumb.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe jury knew these were lies because they were shown a volume of various videos that collectively showed unequivocally that not one of those incidents happened,\u201d Passaglia said.<\/p>\n

Following Gibson\u2019s conviction, the DA\u2019s office issued a press release on Aug. 19<\/a> that described the sequence of events: \u201cWhen officers attempted a pat search for weapons, Mr. Gibson started to actively resist their attempts and fight with officers. Eventually three officers were able to restrain Mr. Gibson and handcuff him.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chan-Silen said Gibson only briefly possessed a handgun for protection against that \u201cracist\u201d neighbor.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Caraway, Conway and Rivera attempted to locate Gibson at his friend\u2019s apartment, loudly kicking on the door and telling the occupants that they could break the door in with no repercussions.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cAin\u2019t nobody gonna do shit if I kick this door down, right?\u201d One of the officers said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The officers found Gibson as he was coming out of an elevator. They told him he wasn\u2019t under arrest, but immediately put their hands on him in an attempt to detain him. All three officers had contact with Gibson, and all four men were soon on the ground. Besides body cameras, the scuffle was captured by a surveillance camera in the hallway.<\/p>\n

At the end, there was a noticeable amount of blood coming from Gibson\u2019s forehead.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The public defender\u2019s office said it wasn\u2019t aware of whether the officers had been reprimanded, but believed one of them was promoted shortly after the incident. SFPD has not yet responded to a request for comment.<\/p>\n

The public defender said it plans to file a complaint with the San Francisco Department of Police Accountability, and notify the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training, or POST, to seek decertification of the officers.<\/p>\n

\u201cProsecutors often charge and overcharge our clients with resisting arrest as leverage to punish our clients and then excuse the police officers\u2019 actions, and then misrepresent the true nature of these incidents,\u201d Raju said. \u201cAll of this is a disservice to our clients, a disservice to the community, and a disservice to the pursuit of justice itself.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Body camera footage showed the three officers punching Gibson, pulling his hair and kneeling on his neck \u2014…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":489849,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[101,103,102,104,106,105],"class_list":["post-489848","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-headlines","tag-san-francisco-news","tag-sf","tag-sf-headlines","tag-sf-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489848","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=489848"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489848\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/489849"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=489848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=489848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=489848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}