The 39-year-old man shot and killed at a weekend “No Kings” protest in Salt Lake City was a successful fashion designer and former “Project Runway” contestant who devoted his life to celebrating artists from the Pacific Islands.
Arthur Folasa Ah Loo was killed when a man who was believed to be part of a peacekeeping team for the protest shot at a person brandishing a rifle at demonstrators, accidentally striking Ah Loo. Ah Loo later died at the hospital, authorities said.
Detectives don’t yet know why the alleged rifleman pulled out a weapon or ran from the peacekeepers, but they charged him with murder and accused him of creating the dangerous situation that led to Ah Loo’s death, Salt Lake City Police Chief Brian Redd said at a Sunday news conference.
Ah Loo leaves behind his wife and two young children, according to a GoFundMe for his family that raised over $100,000 in 48 hours.
The “self-taught” fashion designer born in Samoa, known to many as Afa, devoted his life to doing “the good things for his neighbors and community,” state Rep. Verona Mauga said.
Mauga was at the “No Kings Protest” a few blocks from where Ah Loo was shot. She said she only had a sense that something was wrong when she saw the crowd running.
As tragic as his death is, she said, Ah Loo would have been proud that his last moments were spent fighting for what he believed in.
“If Afa was going to go out any other way than natural causes, it would be standing up for marginalized and vulnerable communities and making sure that people had a voice,” Mauga told The Associated Press on Monday.
While he wasn’t typically overtly political, Ah Loo had a knack for connecting “culture and diversity and service,” and bringing people together, Mauga said.
Benjamin Powell, a hair salon innovator from Fiji, co-founded Create Pacific with Ah Loo shortly after they met four years ago. The organization uplifts artists from the Pacific Islands.
The two artists had a rare creative synergy, Powell said. Ah Loo’s vibrant work delicately weaves traditional Pacific Island attire with modern silhouettes and design. He used flowers indigenous to Samoa as motifs, and frequently incorporated the traditional Pacific Islander art called Tapa, a cloth traditionally made from tree bark, into the garments he made.
Powell admired the meticulous attention to detail that made Ah Loo’s work distinctive.
“You would know right away that it was an Ah Loo design,” Powell said.
Ah Loo and Powell were working on an upcoming August fashion show when he died. Powell said “the show will continue” and honor Ah Loo’s unwavering vision for his community.
Ah Loo’s portfolio has earned numerous accolades over the years. He was a contestant in 2017 on Bravo’s “Project Runway,” a reality television show where fashion designers compete in front of celebrity judges to create runway looks on tight deadlines.
Recently, Ah Loo designed a garment for the star of the Disney Channel animated movie Moana 2, Hawaiian actor Auliʻi Cravalho.
Cravalho wore the outfit, which combined traditional and modern aesthetics from her culture, to the film’s red carpet premiere in Hawaii last November.
“This was the first time I was so active in helping to design a custom look, and Afa surpassed what I had envisioned,” Cravalho told the magazine at the time.
But not all of his work was high-profile, Mauga said.
Ah Loo would volunteer his time and resources to tailor clothing for people who needed help, often refusing to let people compensate him for his work, Mauga said. Sometimes, Ah Loo would playfully criticize the outfits the newly elected Democratic representative wore on the campaign trail, and invite her to his studio so he could make her a new set of blazers. He would also make her dresses for events, sometimes just on a couple of hours notice.
“Afa was so much a part of the community,” she said.
