Arturo Gamboa, 24, was taken into police custody on Saturday evening on a murder charge, said Redd at a Sunday news conference. Ah Loo, who had been taken to the hospital on Saturday evening, where he died from his wounds.

Redd said a man in a brightly colored vest fired three shots from a handgun at Gamboa, inflicting a relatively minor injury to Gamboa but fatally shooting Ah Loo.

Two of the peacekeepers in neon vests allegedly saw Gamboa separate from the crowd of marchers in downtown Salt Lake City, move behind a wall and retrieve a rifle around 8pm, Redd said.

When the two men in vests confronted Gamboa with their handguns drawn, witnesses said Gamboa raised his rifle into a firing position and ran toward the crowd, said Redd.

The writing is all over the place here, I had to read it like five times to figure out what was going on. Bad editor.

[–] JillyB@beehaw.org 4 points 2 days ago

So if I'm reading this right, there were armed peacekeeping volunteers organized with the event (not necessarily by the protest organizers but they were part of the protest). One of them saw a guy grab an AR-15 from an alley and confronted him. The rifle-weilder raised his rifle, the peacekeeper fired several shots, killing a random person and wounding the rifleman. The rifleman is being charged with the murder because Utah law probably counts anybody dying as the result of a crime to be murder for the person committing (a few states do that). They're currently investigating the peacekeeper.

I'm curious to know more about this peacekeeper business. Were they openly armed? Were they all armed? How big was this group? How were they organized? Presumably the rifleman was trying to start shooting or at least threatening to shoot. If the police weren't sure of that much, they wouldn't have charged him with murder. If the peacekeeper isn't even being arrested, my guess is the police feel very confident about how this went down.