A Man Showed Up to Protect Protesters. He Killed an Innocent One Instead.
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelfanone.substack.com [https://michaelfanone.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_7]
Let me tell you about Afa Ah Loo.
Thirty-nine years old, born in Samoa, the youngest of five. He learned to sew from the women in his family, and that skill carried him to a fashion showcase inside Buckingham Palace and onto Project Runway. He became a U.S. citizen in September of 2024 and voted for the first time that November. After that, his friends say, politics got personal. He looked at where the country was headed and told his business partner, “I’m scared for my kids.”
He walked into a No Kings march in downtown Salt Lake City — ten thousand people, one of the biggest demonstrations that city had ever seen — wearing a tan hat his friends could spot from a block away, holding a sign with four words on it. The world is watching.
A few minutes later he was on the ground with a bullet in his temple.
Here’s the part that refuses to fit the clean story. The man who shot him wasn’t a counterprotester. Wasn’t some MAGA agitator hunting for blood. He was a volunteer. He’d signed up to keep the marchers safe, and in that moment he believed he was stopping a mass shooting.
That’s what makes this harder than the tidy political-violence narrative everybody reaches for.
Three men ended up on that street who’d never met. All came to the same protest. All sympathetic to the same cause. On any other day they might’ve been standing shoulder to shoulder.
The first was Arturo Gamboa, twenty-four, born and raised in Salt Lake. He was openly carrying a rifle — legal in Utah — dressed in black with a mask and hood. He stepped behind a column to assemble the rifle so he wouldn’t alarm the crowd, and says the barrel stayed pointed down the whole time, the magazine in his backpack.
The second was a safety volunteer the court papers just call A.F. He’d been watching Gamboa for several minutes, read it as a threat, and got on his radio. Gun, gun, gun.
The third was Matthew Alder, forty-three, an Army veteran and home contractor. A friend had asked him the day before to join the volunteer safety team — no training required, just a yellow vest, a radio, a first aid kit, and a warning that there were credible threats against the march. When that radio call went out, Alder came running, drew his pistol, and says he saw a man hunched against a wall psyching himself up to “mag dump into a crowd.”
So he fired. Three shots, about a second apart.
The first hit Gamboa in the side. The second hit his rifle. In those seconds Gamboa was moving, rounding the corner of the building, and video from a balcony appears to show that barrel pointed down the entire time. By the third shot, prosecutors say, Gamboa had already turned the corner — the threat, whatever it was, had moved away. That third bullet traveled roughly a hundred and sixty feet down a crowded street and hit Afa Ah Loo in the head. He was near a parked car, nowhere close to the man Alder was aiming at.
And there’s one detail in here that should haunt everybody.
There was a second volunteer standing right next to Alder — A.F., gun already drawn. Same man in his sights. Same radio call. He didn’t fire. His reason, to investigators: “There’s no way I can shoot him when he’s running toward a crowd. I’m accountable for every bullet that comes out of my gun.”
Same threat. Same second. Same street. One man pulled the trigger and one man didn’t, and the distance between those two choices is a father of two bleeding out on the asphalt while a doctor from the crowd does chest compressions and begs him to keep fighting.
In twenty years on the job, that was the first thing they drilled into us about a firearm. You own every round. You don’t get to fire into a crowd and call the people you hit an accident. The man standing right next to Alder understood that with a gun already in his hand. That’s not hindsight. That’s the basic standard — and one of the two shooters met it.
The legal fight only gets thornier. In Utah, like most states, you can use deadly force against a danger you reasonably believe is real, even if you turn out to be wrong. That law exists to protect someone who genuinely fears for his life. But it had nothing to say about what happens when your bullet kills an innocent bystander who was never part of the fight. So the DA, Sim Gill, went looking and found his answer in a Massachusetts ruling: self-defense doesn’t shield a shooter whose force is reckless. A man who picks a fight assumes the risk of getting shot. A bystander never signed up for it.
So Gill is focusing on that third shot alone — conceding the first two might’ve been justified, arguing the last one, sent down a crowded street after the threat had moved off, was its own separate, reckless decision. He charged Alder with manslaughter. Up to fifteen years.
I’ll be fair: this isn’t a man who set out to hurt anybody. His lawyer says he believed he was stopping a massacre, and until there’s reason to think otherwise, you take the motive at face value. But this points to something bigger than one shooting gone wrong. A Duke law professor put it best — the only thing separating that feeling of fear from a homicide is five pounds of pressure on a trigger.
Five pounds.
That’s what we’ve built. We’ve flooded our streets and public squares with guns and then told ourselves the answer to a man with a gun is more men with guns. Researchers who track this found the obvious thing: protests where guns show up are far more likely to turn violent. Since 2020 they’ve counted a dozen American protests where a bystander — somebody with no part in any fight — got hit by a stray round. A dozen. And we keep going.
Think about how many people had to be armed and afraid for this to happen. Gamboa felt he needed a rifle to feel safe. The safety team felt they needed pistols to protect the crowd. Everybody was carrying. Everybody was scared. And a tailor in a tan hat holding a piece of cardboard walked into the middle of all that fear.
After the shooting, the national No Kings organization cut ties with the Utah chapter for breaking its no-weapons policy. When the marches came back, nobody was allowed to carry — not the crowd, not the volunteers, nobody. That’s not radical. That’s just sane. It’s the bare minimum.
And I say this as a responsible gun owner: when you live in a country where you can’t hold a sign on a public street without somebody’s stray bullet finding your skull, that country has lost the plot. The right to bear arms was never the right to fire blind into a crowd and walk away calling it a tragedy.
Afa Ah Loo’s kids were seen after his death singing a Samoan song he loved — about a father telling his child to go forth across deep water, to be brave, that he’ll be there on every path. They know the words by heart. They just don’t have him anymore to show them what those words mean.
He showed up because he believed the world was watching, and he wanted to be heard. So let’s watch. Let’s actually look at what happened on that street and refuse to file it under bad luck.
🟧 Paid subscribers get 15% off your next merch order🟧 Founding Members get 20% off for life
You’ll get the link in your welcome email.
GET DISCOUNTS BELOW! ENJOY!
Kommentare
0Sei die erste Person, die kommentiert
Melde dich jetzt an und werde Teil der The Michael Fanone Show-Community!