When a man was shot dead outside a SoMa club in March, San Francisco police announced within a day that they had booked a 19-year-old on suspicion of murder. Five months later, prosecutors have filed formal charges — and the homicide count belongs to a different man, one who wasn't among the two people arrested that night.

The wire version of this story is a flat one: three men charged in a fatal SoMa shooting. But the public record that brackets the case shows the murder count migrating from the teenager SFPD spotlighted in March to a man the department did not arrest until August — a shift neither the police nor the District Attorney has explained on the record, and the latest instance of a gap The Dissent has repeatedly documented between what San Francisco announces at arrest and what it ultimately charges.

The gunfire broke out around 11 p.m. on March 27 at Third and Harrison streets, on SoMa's club-lined edge. Officers found a man on the ground with gunshot wounds; he was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead. Two other people were beaten during the encounter but not shot, the San Francisco Standard reported (external source, opens in a new tab). Nearly five months later, the authorities still have not publicly named the man who was killed.

Police detained two young men near the scene, and the department made sure the arrests were seen. In its Saturday announcement, SFPD said the pair had been "swiftly apprehended." One of them, Edwin Depaz Maldonado, 19, of Richmond, was booked for murder, according to the Standard's Cyrus Farivar; the other, Andry Segura Giron, 20, of San Rafael, was held on a felony assault count.

Then the case went quiet — until August. SFist reported (external source, opens in a new tab) that the department had "touted the quick arrest," and that its reporter, Jay Barmann, could not establish why Depaz-Maldonado was released and then re-arrested months later in Oakland — this time alongside a man who had played no part in the March arrest.

In its Saturday announcement, SFPD said the pair had been "swiftly apprehended."

That man is Eliseo Maldonado-Alvarez. In SFPD's Aug. 10 release (external source, opens in a new tab), the department said its homicide and tactical units served warrants on Aug. 6 in San Rafael and Richmond and recovered what it called "illegal firearms and ammunition." The bookings that followed, detailed by CBS Bay Area (external source, opens in a new tab), inverted the March picture: Maldonado-Alvarez, 20, of San Rafael was jailed on a murder count and a concealed-firearm count, while Depaz-Maldonado — the face of the spring arrest, first booked on suspicion of murder — was taken in again in Oakland and this time held only on assault with a semiautomatic firearm and a concealed weapon, the homicide charge gone. Both were ordered held without bail.

This week's formal charges, first reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, locked in that realignment. Prosecutors charged Maldonado-Alvarez with murder with a firearm, Depaz-Maldonado with assault with a firearm, and Segura-Giron with a felony assault count; all three pleaded not guilty, the Chronicle reported. The paper relayed the prosecution's telling of the night: that Depaz-Maldonado shouted at people in the club line and aimed a gun at them, that the weapon discharged into the ground as the crowd grabbed for it, and that surveillance footage showed Maldonado-Alvarez fire toward a victim. Prosecutors, per the Chronicle, would not say which suspect fired the rounds that wounded someone, nor spell out why Segura-Giron was charged.

The two public records that bracket the case leave a moving target at its center: the teenager SFPD booked for murder in the spring now carries the lightest firearm charge of the trio, and the homicide count rests on a man the department did not surface until late summer. That gap between the arrest a department publicizes and the charge a prosecutor files is a recurring one here. This month alone, The Dissent reported that SFPD arrested a Sunnydale murder suspect only for the DA to decline charges within 48 hours, and that a touted "Operation Disarm" sweep produced only a firearms charge in a nightclub killing.

No one has been convicted; all three men pleaded not guilty, and police and prosecutors alike call the investigation ongoing. But neither the department nor the DA has said on the record how a case SFPD announced in March as a fast murder arrest arrived, five months on, with the killing pinned to someone else.