His last words were “I believe you.”
Less than 40 seconds later, Gracen Coon was shot and killed by a Santa Fe Police officer. The tragedy, which occurred during a mental health call, has left friends and family reeling and community members raising questions about the Santa Fe Police Department’s use of force policy and training.
Heidi Smythe, Coon’s sister who lives in Wisconsin, tells SFR her brother “did not deserve to go out that way by any means” and questions whether the officer’s decision to shoot was justified.
“I think it’s a bunch of BS to be honest, and I think they’re just sort of trigger happy. I mean, three shots at the chest? That’s not an accident,” Smythe says. “And for a box cutter? Really? I’m embarrassed for this officer. You’re on the police force, and you’re afraid of a trans man.”
When SFPD officers responded to the call on that early morning Sept. 22, dispatch notified them it may be a difficult situation.
“It sounds like he’s getting physical with her now,” the dispatcher says in body-cam footage obtained by SFR in reference to Coon and Lili Gordon—a married couple living in a neighborhood off San Mateo Road.
Courtesy Santa Fe PD
Gracen Coon holds up his hands as Santa Fe police bear down on him.
Then, as Officer David Gallegos approaches the residence alongside Officer Charles Ovalle, he tells Ovalle to “go lethal,” signaling to draw their guns. Gallegos swings the door open, his gun in one hand and a taser in the other. Gordon’s panicked voice can be heard.
“Can you guys please get him?” she says.
Gallegos and Ovalle repeatedly tell Coon to step out of the house as they yell from outside and maintain a distance. Coon can be seen holding a box cutter, telling officers, “I got nothing.” Then the green light from Gallegos’s taser steadies on Coon’s body as Ovalle instructs Gallegos to “hit him.” He doesn’t. Gallegos orders Coon to drop the box-cutter. Coon instead steps out of the house into the front doorway.
“I got nothing. Literally nothing,” Coon repeats. “I got nothing. Dude, I don’t want to live.”
Gallegos tells Coon to drop the weapon yet again.
“It’s okay, we’re going to help you out,” Ovalle says.
Coon then takes a step forward.
“I believe you,” Coon says, spinning the box cutter around in his hand. “I be—”
Courtesy Santa Fe PD
Gracen Coon speaks with Santa Fe police shortly before being gunned him down.
Gallegos fires three shots, and Coon falls to the ground. There, on the front porch of a home on La Placita Circle, Coon groaned in agony as he labored to breathe. The officers approach Coon.
“Roll over. Roll over!” Gallegos says as the officers sit Coon up then turn him on his side. “Cuff him.”
Ovalle cuffs Coon, then lays him on his back and tells Gallegos to send for medics.
“Okay, meds are coming. They’re right around the corner, okay?” Ovalle says to Coon, who groans. “You’re okay. You’re going to be alright.”
Minutes later, medics arrive and check for entry and exit points for bullets as Coon lays lifeless in the front stoop. One of the medics notes he can’t find a pulse. Timestamps on the body cam footage indicate Coon wasn’t transferred to an ambulance for approximately five minutes after being shot.
Smythe says it’s a disappointing outcome, given how much struggle her brother went through from early in life. Smythe’s family adopted Coon when he was 10 years old. He came from an abusive background, Smythe says, which led to mental health struggles, forms of self-sabotage and scattered communication with family and friends over the years. Fast forward to six years ago, when Coon lost his adoptive mother, which Smythe called Coon’s “guiding light.” At that time, Coon lost a job and returned to rehab—forced to pick up the pieces yet again. As Coon’s biological family members “dropped like flies” in yea
Courtesy Santa Fe PD
Gracen Coon falls after being shot by police. Body cam footage shows the item police mistook for a gun lying on the porch.
rs after, Smythe says, the cycle continued.
On the phone, Coon had “been normal,” leading up to his last day alive, Smythe says, but the last year of their relationship “was really hard.”
“We really tried actually to get Gracen to move back to Green Bay and just start over…We were stuck in Wisconsin, and I had young kids, so I really couldn’t pick up and visit,” Smythe says. “We talked all the time, back and forth, and it was always the same thing, ‘Yeah, I’m doing really good. Yes, I’m going to do this. Yes, I appreciate you and miss you, love you,’ But then it was like empty promises. I regret not pulling him out of the situation. I kind of just wish I gave him some tough love.”
Now all that’s left are unanswered questions, she says. Yet she adds legal recourse from the family is unlikely, as she believes the system is a “long, expensive road.” Instead, she wants an apology and an explanation.
“Nothing I do is going to bring him back. They took a piece of our life, and I want to know why,” Smythe says. “Why did you think shooting was the only option?”
SFPD’s use of force policy essentially leaves the discretion of when to use force in the hands of officers, noting that the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution “requires that a police officer only use force as is “objectively reasonable under all of the circumstances,” and “must strive to use the minimum amount of force necessary.” When force is “necessary and objectively reasonable,” it states while officers “need not start at the lowest level of force in every situation,” the officer should “evaluate the array of objectively reasonable options” and select “an option anticipated to cause the least injury to the subject while achieving the arrest or lawful objectives.”
The policy also requires that officers consider de-escalation tactics, the mental and physical state of the subject, the number of subjects compared to the number of officers, if the subject has weapons and other factors.
Coon was shot while Gallegos held both a taser and a handgun. SFPD placed Gallegos on administrative leave immediately following the incident, and a mental health professional evaluated and cleared him to return to duty, per standard protocol, Deputy Chief Ben Valdez tells SFR.
Coon was known to SFPD. On Sept. 4 at approximately 11:12 pm—just over two weeks before the fatal incident—Officers Gregory Urbina and Joel Miller arrived to Coon and Gordon’s home to conduct a welfare check. Dispatch had advised officers that Coon’s Starbucks District Manager Tim Base requested the check for him because he did not come into work that day. Officers knocked on the door of the residence but got no answer, a report details. Urbina noted “numerous drops of blood” on the open garage floor. Eventually, Gordon came to the front door after Miller knocked on the windows of the home. Gordon told officers she and Coon “began to argue earlier in the day about financial problems,” and Coon went to the garage away from her and began punching the walls, Urbina wrote. Coon refused medical assistance at the time, Miller wrote in a supplemental report, and advised officers that he “felt safe in the residence and just needed some medication and would return to sleep.”
Lana Lila Seiler, Coon’s ex-partner of 10 years and friend, tells SFR police descriptions of Coon’s behavior in each incident are not emblematic of his character or their time together.
“Evey time I see that, it just breaks my heart again, because that’s not Gracen. Everybody who knew him knew how wonderful he was, and he just was never violent,” Seiler says. “Gracen was the opposite of violence, and we’ve known each other for years. Nobody’s perfect, but there was never a moment in our entire history that I felt fearful.”
The two met in Florida in 2012, later moving together to Colorado. The two separated and Coon made his way to Santa Fe, where he lived with his wife Gordon. While Seiler knew Coon was seeing Gordon, she says she and other friends and family “had no idea” the two had gotten married.
“The relationship didn’t seem that healthy to me,” she says. “There was a lot of secrecy around the relationship with [Gordon], so I don’t know much about that.”
SFR attempted to contact Gordon for comment, who did not respond before publication time.
Seiler and Coon remained in contact until the very last day of his life. He called her the morning of the fatal shooting, she says—roughly 30 minutes before the incident.
“It was a heartbreaking phone call. [Gracen was] hysterically crying and told me they apologized and said that they always make terrible decisions. They made another terrible decision, and they’re sober and they’re not okay, and they said they need help, and they asked me to call for a wellness check,” Seiler says. “I said, ‘It’s okay, whatever the decisions were, it can’t be that big of a deal’…and of course, I have guilt, because most of the time I try to keep them on the phone for a little while. This might have been the literal first time in our entire relationship that I didn’t do that. I trusted the police, and I hung up the phone without trying to calm them down.”
Smythe concurs, saying Gracen “didn’t have a bad bone in his body,” and was never “a violent person.” She says Gordon told her following the incident that her life “was never in danger.”
“It was not like them to be what the police say, like a violent person with a box-cutter,” Smythe continues. “Gracen would hurt themselves before they would hurt another person because of the pain that they have known in their lifetime…I wish I did more on my end because it’s just like I didn’t know how we got to this point? When I saw that it was a mental health call, that made sense to me. The fact that it escalated to the police taking his life is so messed up. There was no way he was that big of a threat.”
As a psychotherapist, Seiler says she wants to educate people on negative perceptions of those struggling with mental health.
“Behaviors can look really scary, or they can look like they’re coming from a place of rage or psychosis, but a lot of times it’s not that,” she says. “But I do know that most people don’t understand what an episode like that would look like, and I do know that they are able to be calmed down. It didn’t seem to me like a situation talking to them that morning that was out of control…I felt like they could have easily been talked down.”
The incident marks the fifth time this year SFPD officers have fired on a subject—a four-year high for the department and quintuple last year’s number of officer-involved shootings. Meanwhile, at the state level, the overall number of OISs has decreased over the same period, New Mexico State Police Public Information Officer Ray Wilson tells SFR.
This is Gallegos’ second officer-involved shooting during his eight years with SFPD and his first use of deadly force. In May 2023, during SFPD’s only OIS incident of the year, Gallegos deployed a less lethal weapon while other officers used deadly force.
Valdez says officers go through a 40-hour training program on use of force plus additional training on early de-escalation techniques. During that program, instructors focus largely on communication and “understanding that our actions may cause them to feel a certain way,” Valdez says. Yet specifics like when an officer is permitted to draw a weapon also rest on that officer’s judgement and “depend on the perceived threat that they see at the time.” Valdez says officers must articulate the reason behind the force used after an incident.
After shooting Coon, Gallegos called in paramedics. During the call, Dispatch asked Gallegos where Coon was shot.
“Probably center mass,” Gallegos said in body cam footage. “He had a 1080 in his left hand—a pistol—and then he had a box-cutter in his right hand.”
As medics arrive, Ovalle walks to Gallegos.
“[Coon is] agonal right now,” Ovalle says, using a medical term that refers to being close to death.
“Dude, he pointed it right at us,” Gallegos replies, sticking his arm out towards Ovalle. “He spun [the box-cutter] and then he put it at us like that, and he said he didn’t want to live. God bless, man.”
Gallegos repeated his claim about Coon having a gun to a supervisor, according to the SFPD report, however, no gun was referenced in police social media posts about the incident from either SFPD or New Mexico State Police. Body cam footage reviewed by SFR shows Coon holding a second object in his hands, but it is clearly not a gun. Immediately following the shooting, officer Ovalle tells Gallegos he did not see a gun. Body-cam footage indicates Ovalle believed Coon had a lighter in his other hand.
SFPD use of force policy notes “the officer’s justification will be reviewed to determine whether or not the force used was in or out of policy” and “failure to adequately document or explain the facts, circumstances and inferences when reporting force may lead to the conclusion that the force used was out of policy.”
While Police Chief Paul Joye declined to answer questions directly related to Coon’s case due to ongoing investigations into the incident, he agreed to speak to SFR more broadly about officer-involved shootings. Joye tells SFR the department does not evaluate OISs by trend, saying “each one has to be evaluated individually” and he wants “to be very careful not to speak broadly” about what he thinks “is or is not happening trendwise.” However, he notes officers are encountering “a higher level of violence” than before.
“This applies not just with use of force, but also with assault charges and other things that officers citywide are dealing with; situations where there is more violence,” Joye says. “It’s been more violent than we’ve seen in previous years, and we do see more gun violence than we’ve seen in years before.”
With more violence apparently comes more force. Use of force numbers provided by SFPD show a consistent rise between 2020 and 2023. Policy has not been updated since 2020, Joye says, but he notes a committee exists to evaluate use of force quarterly and yearly. While he couldn’t pinpoint any specific changes made to policy as a result of the use of force committee since 2020, he says Valdez and his team work with the committee and instructors for the department to review and evaluate policy and incidents to “make sure SFPD is in line with best practices.” Furthermore, he makes it clear that officers don’t “join the force with the idea that at some point they are going to use their gun and shoot someone.”
“For a lot of our guys, myself included…the idea of having to be put in a situation of lethal force is a terrible and scary situation,” Joye says. “It is life-altering for officers. We’ve got officers who are retired…and you talk to them, they do see their life as before and after they had an incident because it affected them so much.”
