How the fatal police shooting in SLO went down

Author

Carly Heltzel
March 09, 2026

Good morning. It’s Monday, and I’m reading about how Pixar’s team studied the real life habitats of California’s beavers for their latest movie. Onto the five Cal Poly, SLO and California stories you need to know for today.

1.

A minute before a SLO police officer shot and killed a man with a fake gun, someone called 911 and told them they knew the man, had seen the toy gun up close and that the gun was not real. As soon as the officers arrived on scene, one yelled “hey!” and the man got on his knee and pointed the ‘gun’ at the officers. The same officer said “No, hey, stop! Stop! Stop!” before firing one second later. The man was pronounced dead 10 minutes later.

2.

A Cal Poly aerospace professor thought he would have to wait until retirement to built his own plane. He now teaches a class that does just that. The first plane he built with students, named Velma, flew for the first time last June after 15 months of work, and it reached up to 8,000 feet in the sky. Now, they’re building another that will be almost entirely built by students.

3.

Up the coast at Año Nuevo, elephant seals saw an outbreak of the avian flu, killing some pups. But the closer-to-home San Simeon rookery is in the clear so far, with little risk of infection since the seals at Año Nuevo seem to have been directly infected by contact with birds, rather than spreading it among other seals. Avian flu can cause seizures and tremors in seals, and they often die within 24 hours of infection.  

4.

Community college districts are spending millions to develop AI-powered chatbots to answer questions about their campuses. Many of the chatbots struggle to provide clear and accurate answers to certain questions, with one unable to identify the college’s president. They are often trained of frequently asked question pages or other templates that can be outdated or limited in scope. Districts are trying to make them better with multi-year contracts and tools that scrape websites instead.

5.

A conservative podcaster gifted Gov. Gavin Newsom a gun last year, but his own gun control laws and restrictions prevent him from taking it home. If he wants to have the gun he would have to arrange for it to ship to a licensed firearms dealer, pass a background check, get fingerprinted, take a handgun safety test, provide identifying document and pay roughly $300 in taxes and fees. It may not make his priority list, but upon receiving the firearm, Newsom told the podcaster: “Brother, this is fabulous.”