Alfred Okwera Olango was 38 years old when he was shot and killed by El Cajon police on September 27, 2016. He was holding an e-cigarette. The officer who shot him simultaneously tasered him — both actions happening at once, in a moment that lasted less than a second. Olango was Acholi, born in Uganda, part of a family that had fled the Lord's Resistance Army insurgency when he was a child. He had spent years in refugee camps near Gulu before arriving in New York in 1991 with his mother and eight siblings. The distance from those camps to the parking lot in El Cajon where he died was enormous in every way except the one that mattered most.
Alfred Olango's family came from Kampala, Uganda. The LRA insurgency that destabilized northern Uganda through the 1980s and 1990s drove hundreds of thousands of Acholi people from their homes, and the Olango family was among them. Alfred spent time in refugee camps around Gulu — camps that offered physical safety but little else — before the family's resettlement brought them to New York in 1991. He was a child when he arrived. Over the following years the family made their way to San Diego County, part of the substantial East African community that had established itself in El Cajon. By 2016 Olango had children of his own and had lived in the United States for 25 years.
Police responded to a 911 call about a man behaving erratically in a strip mall parking lot. The caller was Olango's sister, who had phoned because she was worried about him — she waited over an hour for police to arrive. When Officer Richard Gonsalves confronted Olango, Olango pulled an object from his pocket and assumed a shooting stance. Officer Emily Browning tasered him at the same moment Gonsalves shot him. The object was an e-cigarette vape pen. Olango was transported to a hospital and died. The shooting took place in front of witnesses and was captured on video.
San Diego County District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis declined to file charges against the officers in January 2017, concluding that the shooting was legally justified given what the officers perceived in the moment. A civil lawsuit proceeded separately. In July 2019, a civil jury voted 12-0 that the shooting was proper — a unanimous verdict that nonetheless did not settle the question of what the shooting meant, or what it represented about the circumstances that produced it. The killing sparked days of protests in El Cajon and across San Diego County. Olango's death became part of the national conversation about police use of force and about the particular vulnerabilities of people experiencing mental health crises when they encounter armed officers.
The biographical fact that frames everything else is this: Alfred Olango had already survived something. The LRA insurgency in northern Uganda was one of the most brutal conflicts of the late twentieth century, characterized by mass atrocity and the systematic abduction of children. Olango was a child in that environment. He made it to refugee camps. He made it to the United States. He raised children of his own in El Cajon. The trajectory of his life — from a conflict zone in Uganda to a parking lot in California — is not the kind of story that fits easily into any single frame, but it is the story, and it matters to any honest accounting of who Alfred Okwera Olango was.
The shooting occurred at approximately 32.807°N, 116.952°W in El Cajon, San Diego County, in a commercial area near the intersection of East Main Street and Mollison Avenue. El Cajon is in the broad valley east of San Diego. Nearest airports: KSEE (Gillespie Field) 2 miles north, KSAN (San Diego International) 15 miles west. Best viewed at 1,500–2,500 feet MSL while transiting the El Cajon Valley.