A twenty year old man was shot and killed on Sunday evening in San Francisco’s Aquatic Park whilst playing Pokemon GO. The man, identified as Calvin Riley, was playing with a group of people in the dark. Calvin and his friend, John Kirby, noticed a suspicious man watching them from the top of a hill overlooking the park. However, as it was dark and the group were playing Pokemon they did not pay much attention to the stranger watching. Calvin was walking ahead of the group, went around the corner and appears to have been shot in the back without an argument. Calvin received first aid in the park but was fatally wounded from the gunshot. There appears to have been no motive for the killing. In John’s words, “Then when the friend came around a corner he heard a gunshot, saw his friend fall, and whoever did it ran away and possibly got into a car.”
Calvin’s family moved to the San Francisco area from a high crime East Coast city for a better quality of life. He graduated from Serra High School in San Mateo and played for the San Joaquin Delta College baseball team. The head coach, Reed Peters, explained: “It’s a huge loss to everyone. He was a great kid, a great competitor.” Lynn Cullivan, National Park Service Management Assistant, said: “Well it’s definitely a tragedy. I mean this a place for people to have fun and recreate and we want people to feel safe and be happy in our parks.” The family have established a GoFundMe account to help pay for Riley’s funeral, which at the time of writing had raised almost $35,000.
Pokemon GO is an augmented reality treasure hunt game based around players locating Pokemon monsters on a real world map and traveling to them. When they are close enough, the application switches to the camera view and players must flick Pokemon balls at the monster in order to capture it. Once captured, Pokemon monsters may be trained and developed to compete against other players. Nintendo and the game developer, Niantic, have included real world locations such as Pokemon Gyms and Pokestops, and an in-game currency of Pokecoins, allowing players to train their monsters and top up on monster hunting figure goodies. The game has very quickly been adopted by players in those countries where it’s been released. It has been linked with criminal activities, whereby unsuspecting players have been targeted by robbers.
