By St. John Barned-Smith
Source San Francisco Chronicle
Sgt. Joelle Harrell was standing near the corner of Grant and Post just before 3:30 p.m. on Saturday when she heard three pops about a block south of her. For a moment, she wondered if it was the skateboarders who often frequent Maiden Lane — but the noise was too loud.
She started running south toward Geary and called out over the radio that she was going to investigate possible gunshots nearby.
As she passed Maiden Lane, she looked left, and right.
No skateboarders.
"Those are gunshots," she thought.
She ran past a shop where shoppers standing in front seemed to not have registered what was happening. When they saw her running, they scattered.
It took her less than a minute to reach the end of the block and dart around a Muni bus idling at the corner. Then she saw him: the shirtless man crouched by a U.S. post office box, with blood covering his scalp and seeping from a chest wound.
"There was so much blood," she said.
The situation was moving so fast that she didn't even ask his name. She grabbed him by his shoulders and fired off some questions: What happened? What did the shooter look like? Where had he gone? And were those sandals lying on the ground the shooter's?
The victim, San Francisco 49ers first-round draft pick Ricky Pearsall, had been walking back to his Tesla after shopping at Rimowa and Louis Vuitton when a 17-year-old boy from Tracy accosted him and attempted to rob him, police say.
At that moment, though, Harrell didn't know all that.
"He tried to rob me!" Harrell recalled the man telling her.
He told her the shooter looked like a young man with dark curly hair, who'd been wearing all black. He'd headed east down Geary, running barefoot because his black and white slip-on sandals had fallen off.
She yelled to a motorcycle officer, who had just arrived, to put the news of the robbery out on the radio.
She turned to another sergeant who'd arrived at the scene and told them to call an ambulance.
By that time, she'd grabbed Pearsall's shirt, pressing it into his chest to create pressure on the wound. She pressed her baseball cap against the exit wound in his back.
"I was using my hand for the front just to create a suction so the air wouldn't enter the wound," she said.
She said she could feel him getting tense, the anxiety and fear filling him as he realized the extent of his injuries. He was a football player, he said, for the 49ers.
Harrell was just trying to keep pressure on his wounds and slow the bleeding. Stay calm, she told him.
Pearsall asked if he was going to die.
No, she reassured him. It wasn't his time. Harrell, a devout Catholic, started praying.
"You're strong," she said she kept telling him. "Just focus on the breathing."
"And he listened," Harrell recalled. "He calmed down, and that's what I wanted him to do."
Within minutes, more sirens filled the air.
"That siren is the ambulance," she told him. "It's here for you. ... It's just a matter of time before we get you in there."
Another officer arrived. Was the guy they'd detained down the street the shooter?
"Go look at him," the officer told her.
About 200 feet east, she found a young man, wearing all black — with no shoes. Police later said he'd suffered a gunshot wound to his arm — apparently incurred during the altercation.
He looked exactly as Pearsall had described.
"Keep that guy there!"
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