Victim In Sunset Shooting Identified as Longtime Neighborhood Resident and City Employee With Checkered Past

"The victim in the fatal shooting Sunday morning in San Francisco's Outer Sunset has been identified as a well known local character who had reportedly turned his life around after being released from prison."

"The victim, as we now know from Mission Local and KTVU, was 58-year-old Eric Paul Bigone, a longtime resident of the Sunset District and, as one friend called him, a "neighborhood icon." Bigone had apparently been associated in his youth with a group known as SDI either "Sunset District Irish" or "Sunset District Incorporated" depending on who you ask."

"As SF Weekly characterized them in 2004, "SDI was a loose affiliation of neighborhood kids who came from good families, who went to good Catholic schools, who liked to party, and who loved to defend the honor of the neighborhood with their fists." Some viewed them as a kind of gang that harassed people of color who came to Ocean Beach, as Mission Local notes, but they "largely managed to avoid the attention police focused on gangs in other neighborhoods.""

"Bigone was a local boxing enthusiast and part of a band called Whiskey Business. And he appears to have been a hard-partying dude into his 30s, when he got arrested in Lake County in 2004 after driving head-on into another vehicle on Highway 29 and witnesses said he had been seen with a joint and a bottle of Wild Turkey just before the crash. He was convicted of vehicular manslaugher, and served a possibly significant amount of prison time—it's unclear when he was released, but the description by friends' of how he'd been on the straight and narrow makes it sound somewhat recent."

A fatal shooting occurred Sunday morning in San Francisco’s Outer Sunset on the 2500 block of 46th Avenue near Ulloa Street around 5:20 a.m. The victim was identified as 58-year-old Eric Paul Bigone, a longtime Sunset District resident described as a neighborhood icon. Bigone had earlier ties to SDI, described as a loose group of neighborhood youths that liked to party and defended the neighborhood. Some accounts characterized SDI as a gang that harassed people of color, though it reportedly avoided the attention given to gangs elsewhere. Bigone was a boxing enthusiast and part of a band called Whiskey Business. In 2004 he was arrested after a head-on crash in Lake County, convicted of vehicular manslaughter, and later reportedly returned to a straight-and-narrow life, including working for the city as a general laborer.

Read at sfist.com