Paulette Brown returned Friday to the NoPa corner where her 17-year-old son was gunned down two decades earlier, taped up his photograph, and made the same request she has made every August since 2006: that someone in San Francisco finally say what they know.

The gathering at Grove and Baker streets read like a familiar civic ritual — another anniversary of another open homicide. But it undersold what Brown has accomplished in 20 years of refusing to let the case go quiet. She has helped rewrite the city's rules for paying homicide tipsters, helped stand up a cold-case bulletin board inside police stations, and won a street name for her son. The anniversary's real question is whether any of that machinery can dislodge a killing from 2006 — an era before doorbell cameras recorded nearly every block.

Aubrey Abrakasa Jr. was shot at 3:14 p.m. on August 14, 2006, near the corner of Grove and Baker in the North-of-the-Panhandle district, according to the San Francisco Police Department (external source, opens in a new tab). He was 17 and days from starting his senior year. By every account since, he had nothing to do with the gunfire that killed him. Witnesses have described him yelling a warning as a car bore down Baker Street before roughly 30 rounds were fired, striking him a dozen times, SFist has reported. Detectives have long leaned toward a mistaken-identity theory. The file, SFPD #060-862-038, is still open.

Brown convened Friday's memorial, as she has for years, to hold the case and other unsolved deaths in public view. Every killing carries identical grief, she told the crowd, whether at the hands of police or of neighbors — and none of it heals, she argued, until the cases close, according to Bay City News, which covered the event.

What sets this anniversary apart is how much of the city's cold-case apparatus now bears Brown's fingerprints. In June 2025, the Board of Supervisors — with her backing — rewrote who may collect San Francisco's homicide-tip rewards. A quarter-million-dollar reward has sat on her son's case for years, but the old terms paid out only after a conviction, a bar high enough to keep frightened witnesses silent. The revised rules release money once charges are filed, protect a tipster's anonymity, and extend eligibility to people with prior arrests or convictions, SFist reported. SFPD wrapped the overhaul into an outreach push it brands "You Can Help, Too," and Brown helped assemble a digital display of victims' reward bulletins now mounted in district-station lobbies, the department said in its anniversary release.

Those changes target precisely the obstacle this case represents. A daylight shooting in 2006 left virtually no digital record — no ring cameras, no dense surveillance — so a break has always hinged on a person choosing to talk. According to SFist, then-Chief Toney Chaplin said on the killing's 10th anniversary in 2016 that investigators suspected a local gang, though Abrakasa himself belonged to none. No arrest followed.

Derrick Lew, who was sworn in as police chief in January, used the anniversary to press the appeal again. Citywide killings are near record lows, he said, but a single death is one too many, and his investigators would not rest while residents were still being victimized, per Bay City News. Assistant District Attorney Stacie Pettigrew offered Brown a measured kind of faith — not today, perhaps not tomorrow, she said, but she believed a prosecution would come one day.

Brown's persistence has pulled other grieving parents into her circle. Mattie Scott, whose son George was shot dead in 1996, spoke of the horror of being called to identify a child at the morgue — a nightmare, she said, that never leaves.

The city has already fixed one permanent marker to Brown's fight: in 2024 supervisors renamed a stretch of Grove Street for her son, CBS News Bay Area reported (external source, opens in a new tab). Someone, she told the station then, might see it, remember, and come forward. Twenty years in, that remains the entire ask. Anyone with information is urged to contact SFPD's Homicide Detail or the anonymous tip line at (415) 575-4444.