Glenn Achampon, a 23-year-old technician at San Francisco General Hospital, was killed in the early morning of Saturday, Nov. 23 when a car crashed into a building at Potrero Avenue and 24th Street.
At about 2:13 a.m., the San Francisco Police Department responded to a collision. A vehicle with possibly two occupants collided with a building, according to the department.
The car struck the building at 1170 Potrero Ave., according to Robert Sharp, a neighbor who lives on the block. Achampon, the victim, was in the passenger seat. There was no information available about the driver.
Achampon, a contractor with AYA Healthcare, a travel nursing agency, was on a one-week contract in San Francisco, his girlfriend Kayla said. He was scheduled to head back to New York state, where he lived, on Friday. But Kayla said that Achampon’s employer mixed up his flight details and he had to stay for another day.
Kayla talked to Achampon on Friday around 8 p.m. on a FaceTime call. He was in the passenger seat with his co-worker Aaron behind the wheel, and said they were going sightseeing around the city.
“I told him to have fun and I’d talk to him later,” Kayla said. “And that was the last time I heard from him.”
Ralph Achampon, Glenn’s older brother, was supposed to pick Glenn up from the airport that evening. Instead, he got a call from the San Francisco medical examiner’s office on Saturday morning.
For the past two weeks, Ralph has been grieving the loss of his brother and raising money for the funeral, while trying to bring Achampon back to New York. He is also trying to get their mother from Ghana, where the brothers were born, to the United States to see her son. The brothers moved Stateside in September 2012, and their mother stayed in Ghana. The family’s GoFundMe had raised $4,710 as of Monday evening.
The brothers, one year apart, “have done everything together and never spent more than two years away from each other,” Ralph said.
Achampon was a person with a “brutal honesty,” and many friends, Ralph said. He was an NROTC midshipman and wanted to join the Navy. He planned to go back to college next year.
“If God blesses me with a long life, what am I supposed to do?” Ralph said. “Live 50ish years, remembering that I had a brother like that?”
Achampon ran half-marathons, and his neck was heavy with dozens of medals, as photographed in his girlfriend’s Instagram. “Glenn loved a challenge!” Kayla wrote in one of her stories. In other posts, and almost always smiling, he played mini-golf, recorded TikTok dances, and celebrated his birthday, blowing out a candle on a flan instead of a slice of cake.
“Never in a million years did I think I would be making a post like this about you,” Kayla wrote, in a post announcing his death. “You mean the world to me and I pray you are in a better place.”
This is an open and active investigation. Anyone with information is asked to contact the SFPD at 415-575-4444 or text a tip to TIP411 and begin the message with SFPD.
Be the first to leave a comment