At 5:20 p.m. PT, a 32-year-old white man entered the part of the SFPD Mission Station parking lot that`s restricted, said spokesman Albie Esparza. Three sergeants approached the man, who has not been identified, and told him to leave. The man began to walk away, towards the driveway of the station. But as the sergeants prepared to get in their vehicles, they found the suspect was still in the parking lot and was blocking their exit.

The sergeants approached the man a second time and asked him to leave. Facing them, the suspect put his hands in his hoodie and began to back out of the parking lot, said Esparza. The sergeants asked him to show them his hands. When he reached the threshold, he lifted up the shirt from its wasteband and showed what officers said appeared to be a handgun. As he pulled the gun out, two sergeants fired at the suspect, hitting him three times.

He was transported to San Francisco General Hospital, where he died. The officers weren`t injured and have been placed on paid administrative leave, police said.

Earlier in the day, the suspect had approached Mission Station officers on an unrelated call at the intersection of 16th and Mission, asking them what kind of guns San Francisco police carry and if they`d been involved in any officer-involved shootings, said the SFPD in a statement.

The Mission neighborhood of San Francisco is a sometimes chaotic mix of hip bars catering to San Francisco`s technology workers, homeless people, and recent immigrants from central America.

Police-involved killings have been drawing particular attention, particularly if the suspect is black, since the deaths of unarmed black men Michael Brown and Eric Garner by white police officers, and the shooting of New York police officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos by a black man while the officers sat in a patrol car.

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