San Francisco was invaded by homeless people
While responding to a 911 call regarding a street fight in the Marina District, police found 53-year-old Don Carmignani standing on the sidewalk with blood running down his face. It was 19:20. It was dusk on April 5 and several witnesses were able to clearly see Carmignani’s attacker: a young homeless man who was known in the area. The police arrested him two minutes later, right down the block. An ambulance took Carmignani to Zuckerberg General Hospital in San Francisco.
“Other” was neither vague nor rhetorical. This was indeed the second high-profile attack in a matter of days. Two days earlier, Bob Lee, the millionaire creator of CashApp, was stabbed to death in the city center. Police had not yet made an arrest in Lee’s case, but many pointed to both incidents as evidence that city leaders had failed to curb what they considered a dangerous new level of civil unrest. On his Fox show, Tucker Carlson railed against Lee and Carmignani together, saying California’s liberal governor was trying to “change reality” by ignoring the deterioration in public safety plaguing the state.
Fresh material appeared in The Chronicle. Ray Carmignani, Don’s father, told the newspaper his family, whose roots in the city go back centuries, are tired of it. They planned to leave San Francisco. “We’ll go to Nevada, we’ll go to Arizona,” he said. “I can’t worry about walking out the door and getting attacked.” The New York Post also got into the game, then the British tabloids – The Daily Mail and The Independent – warmed up The Post’s reports under different headlines. The mostly symbolic title of “fire commissioner” was repeated with such righteousness that it seemed as if Carmignani was practically running the department. In the space of 72 hours, the Marin outbreak went from a non-fatal attack to seemingly global news – yet another source of data about a city in free fall.
One of the aspects that made Carmignani’s story interesting was where it took place. The Marina was an affluent and protected area overlooking Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge. Katherine Stefani, the executive who represents Marina at City Hall, told a reporter that such things were rare in her area, or if not rare, at least new. “I’ve been here 21 years,” she said. “This has never happened before.” Carmignani was a former cannabis entrepreneur who dabbled in real estate, and Stephanie knew her family through the Marin community.
Carmignani was released from the hospital with more than 100 stitches and a prescription for OxyContin. He agreed to record an interview with KPIX. Since he had not yet spoken to police, this was his first official statement and the first time San Franciscans heard the victim’s story. Sitting in the kitchen wearing a gray newsboy cap, with get-well cards neatly arranged on the table behind him, Carmignani identified the root cause of his attack.
“My city is in chaos,” he said. “There are animals on the street who say they are going to rape your daughter and kill your mother.” He continued, “And when you call for help, 911, and it’s your savior – and they don’t show up, what do you do?” Evidence later confirmed this: Carmignani’s family called 911 on Doty hours before the attack but received no help. After failing to get the situation under control, Carmignani continued, leaders evicted longtime, tax-paying residents like his family and himself. When he said “a long time ago,” he meant it: the Carmignanis had lived in Marina since 1902. They owned two houses in the block where the altercation took place.
Carmignani’s remarks reflected national opinion about his city, and this consensus, in turn, explained why Carmignani became national news. The bloody beating of a former city official by a deranged homeless man confirmed what everyone knew about San Francisco in 2023: the situation was headed for disaster. “What happened to San Francisco?” Anderson Cooper asked this question in a CNN special in May of this year, and the answers were exemplary in how the media has come to represent the city. What happened to San Francisco was “crime, homelessness and drug use.” What happened was “breaking laws left and right.” In short, what happened was that “everything went crazy.”
The story of San Francisco being a zombified, crime-ridden wasteland dates back to around June 2021, when a video of a man casually shoveling makeup from a Walgreens aisle into a trash bag before riding out on his bike went viral. In two years
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