Salt Lake City, UT — When friends of Arturo Gamboa heard that he had been shot at a protest last Saturday, they were shocked.

A fixture in the punk and activist scenes of Salt Lake, Gamboa is a known leftist and musician who regularly carries firearms at protests in the city. And though he’s shown up to rallies armed for years, Saturday was the first time it resulted in violence.

While open carrying his AR-15 rifle at Saturday’s “No Kings” protest in downtown Salt Lake, two volunteer “peacekeepers” there on behalf of the event organizers approached Gamboa and opened fire, wounding him and killing an unrelated protester, Arthur “Afa” Ah Loo. While a family mourns the death of a father, Gamboa’s friends are preparing for challenges ahead as they rally support for the young punk rocker.

On Saturday, June 14, Salt Lake City gathered alongside hundreds of other cities and towns to demonstrate under the banner of “No Kings,” a set of national protests organized by a coalition of liberal groups, including 50501, to voice discontent with Trump’s policies and administration.

Protesters gathered in downtown Salt Lake at Pioneer Park at 6:00 p.m. After a rally, the crowd of about 10,000 people began marching toward the Wallace F. Bennett Federal Building in the heart of downtown Salt Lake. For nearly an hour, the crowd walked in the streets, holding anti-Trump signs and joining in chants.

As is common at similar rallies, Saturday’s No Kings demonstration in Salt Lake had protest marshals scattered generously throughout the crowd, there to maintain order, cooperate with police and make sure any unsanctioned protest activity is quelled. Organizers and volunteers in high visibility vests patrolled the event as demonstrators rallied, and walked alongside the march as it progressed through the city.

A growing presence at demonstrations in recent years, many protesters hold disdain for protest marshals, pejoratively called “peace police.” To many, the use of marshals hampers spontaneous and autonomous tactics, and puts those who are willing to take more risky actions during protests in danger. In some instances, these “peace police” have gone so far as to isolate and turn in to police protesters who take on more confrontational roles, leading to arrests and police violence.

At Salt Lake City’s No Kings protest, at least two of these “peacekeeping team” members, as they’ve been identified in police statements, were armed with handguns.

According to the affidavit justifying Gamboa’s arrest, these two “peacekeepers” saw Arturo step away from the crowd and determined he was acting suspiciously. They, according to the police report, saw Arturo remove an AR-15 style rifle from his backpack and begin manipulating the weapon.

The “peacekeepers” told police they drew their own guns before telling Arturo to drop his rifle. At that point, according to their statements to police, Arturo “lifted the rifle, and… began running toward the large crowd gathered on State Street holding the rifle in a firing position.”

That’s when one “peacekeeper” fired three rounds at Arturo, hitting him once. His other two shots missed, and one struck a nearby protester. Arthur “Afa” Ah Loo, a 39-year-old father and renowned fashion designer, was critically wounded by the errant bullet and later died in the hospital.

Ah Loo, originally from Samoa, had recently gained U.S. citizenship, was committed to civic service and felt a strong sense of duty to help his community, according to reporting by Utah News Dispatch.

But multiple videos captured of the incident show a different version of events than the “peacekeepers” described to police.

In a brief clip shot by a bystander on a balcony, the two men in high visibility vests are seen pointing their guns at Arturo as he calmly walked toward the crowd, ostensibly to rejoin the protest. Arturo, with his rifle pointed at the ground, was walking with his back toward the two peacekeepers, about 15 yards away from them.

While the video doesn’t have discernible audio between “peacekeepers” and Gamboa in the moments before the shooting, there doesn’t look to be any interaction between Gamboa and the protest marshals before one opens fire. Gamboa only began running once one of the people in vests started shooting at him.

A second video captured on a car’s dash cam shows Gamboa move away from the crowd in the moments before the shooting. After one “peacekeeper” saw Gamboa behind a fence, apparently removing his rifle from his backpack, he called in another protest security team member. Both “peacekeepers” drew handguns, evidently without any interaction with Gamboa prior to drawing, and ultimately firing, on him.

As protesters scattered following the “peacekeeper” shooting into the crowd, Gamboa fled, injured. He was found and arrested a short time later by police.

He was taken into custody on charges of acting with “depraved indifference to human life” and “knowingly engag[ing] in conduct that creates a grave risk of death to another individual” which the police say caused the death of Ah Loo, according to the arrest affidavit.

Despite having been the one to shoot and kill Ah Loo and wound Arturo, the yet unidentified No Kings “peacekeeper” was detained and released without charges after being questioned by police.

Utah 50501, the group behind the protest, released a statement addressing the shooting on Monday, saying they had selected security volunteers based on their “military, first responder and other relevant de-escalation experience.” Days later, the national organization released a statement decrying the Utah chapter’s use of armed security and severing ties with the state chapter.

Gamboa was held for five days without bail and was granted release on Friday afternoon on the conditions that he surrender his passport and his firearms and remain living with his father.

A kind friend

On Wednesday night, a couple dozen people gathered at The Beehive, a local punk venue, to write letters to their incarcerated friend, band mate, and community member. Between writing supportive notes, Arturo’s friends described him as a well known, well-loved and kind figure in punk and activist circles in Salt Lake.

“In the punk scene, if somebody doesn’t hate you, it’s weird,” Konrad Keele, a long time friend of Arturo’s told Unicorn Riot. “But nobody hates Arturo, and it’s not weird.”

Arturo’s self-described “punk dad,” Keele met the young musician when Gamboa’s bands started playing shows at the DIY venues he helped run. Over the years, the two built a relationship and Keele took an interest in supporting Gamboa as a new musician in the scene.

So when he got word of the shooting late Saturday, Keele immediately began organizing support. After talking to his own lawyer for advice, he reached out to public defenders, trying to secure legal help for Arturo.

In the days since the shooting and Arturo’s arrest, Keele has been making fliers and organizing in support of Gamboa, pulling together fundraising and support events and talking to media to share Arturo’s story.

A 24-year-old musician and activist, Gamboa has been a regular presence at demonstrations in Salt Lake since at least 2020, often open carrying his AR-15, as is legal under Utah law.

Since becoming politically active, in large part as a process of reconciling with his mixed identities, the Venezuelan-American has regularly turned up at local protests. Gamboa has for years protested alongside causes like the movement for Black lives and against police violence, including in the case of Bernardo Palacios, who was killed by Salt Lake City Police in 2020.

Multiple friends of Arturo’s said it wasn’t at all uncommon to see him at demonstrations and protests, usually with a firearm of some kind.

“He went multiple times – dozens of protests – armed in the same way without incident,” Andrew Earley, owner of the Beehive, where supporters gathered to write letters, told Unicorn Riot.

As Earley tells it, Arturo was regularly armed, but never made it his identity or carried firearms in a way that made others feel unsafe or uncomfortable.

According to friends, Arturo is vocal about his antiracist politics and feels strongly about showing up as an armed leftist at protests. He sees it as important to have armed people at left-leaning events, and attends demonstrations and rallies with the intention of protecting participants, Earley said.

And while he says Arturo has been successful in that goal, Earley thinks others at Saturday’s march had the wrong mentality to be acting as security.

“If you’re going to be security, your goal should be to interface between armed protesters and make sure everyone is safer, not going after armed leftists,” he said of the “peacekeeper” who shot Gamboa and killed Ah Loo. “I think from the jump they did things wrong.”

‘It’s exactly what not to do’

Organizers with Yellow Peril Tactical, an anticapitalist and antiracist firearms training group which has done armed security at protests and rallies for years, agree with Earley’s assessment.

The group has developed and honed tactics for handling threats at protests and has a history of providing armed security at marches, rallies and demonstrations. When they saw the footage of Saturday’s shooting, they were astounded.

“It’s exactly what not to do, in the most plain way,” Snow, with Yellow Peril Tactical, said of the encounter.

In her experience as someone who has provided armed security in similar circumstances, Snow said the first step in this scenario should have been to approach Arturo to assess if he was a threat or not. From that point, she said, security personnel should have attempted to deescalate if necessary, or simply urge him to be safe and to defer to security organizers if it wasn’t determined he was a threat.

When “peacekeepers” saw Arturo move behind a wall and start manipulating his weapon, that’s when they should have intervened, Yoshiko, another contributor to Yellow Peril Tactical, told Unicorn Riot.

“Instead of doing anything, they watched and waited as Arturo walked out of this alleyway, took that corner where the engagement happened, and they effectively ambushed Arturo,” Yoshiko said.

To Yoshiko and Snow, the footage shows under-trained and ill prepared protest security volunteers operating out of fear and responding with lethal force before they understood the situation.

“In the capacity that I’ve been doing security at marches, we have people that we don’t know show up armed all the time,” Yoshiko added. “You talk to those people, you introduce yourself,” she said.

While Arturo remains in custody, his community is working to build support. A fundraiser punk show has been organized for later this month, and friends have been busy spreading the word about Arturo’s circumstances.

“The next thing happens, that’s what people care about, but Arturo will not be forgotten,” Keele said of his commitment to seeing Arturo through whatever transpires.

As of Friday, District Attorney Sim Gill had not filed charges against Arturo or anyone else involved in the shooting. A judge granted an extension Thursday to prosecutors who, under Utah statute, are required to file charges or apply for an extension within 72 hours of taking someone into custody.

Utah 50501 did not respond to a request for comment.

This story was updated Friday June 20 at 4:53 pm

---

Follow us on X (aka Twitter), Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, Instagram, Mastodon, Threads, BlueSky and Patreon.

Please consider a tax-deductible donation to help sustain our horizontally-organized, non-profit media organization: