San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Devastating fire follows neighbors’ years of hell
Nicolas King has typed notes into his phone for the past seven years documenting scary behavior by a frequent visitor to his block and the numerous 911 calls he and his neighbors made in response.
There were the loud screaming matches peppered with threats he’d hear from 112 Eureka St., the top apartment in the building next door. The times the visitor threw rocks, eggs and yogurt containers at the building. The time he put a lit flare through the mail slot. The time he smashed in a door with a can of paint. The time he scaled scaffolding on King’s building in the middle of the night.
King’s notes from March 5 are the most shocking of all.
“He burned down 112. Our house is on fire.”
Lucian Ruiz, 33, sits in County Jail on $400,000 bail, ordered at a preliminary hearing Wednesday to stand trial on a host of charges including arson, assaulting two police officers, threatening two police officers and possessing an incendiary device. He is due back in court April 28.
Meanwhile, five households in the Castro — including three families with kids, one of them a newborn — were burned out of their homes, displaced during a pandemic and their belongings ruined.
And the saddest part of all, say neighbors and a city supervisor, is city officials knew from the scores of 911 calls and other reports over nearly a decade that Ruiz made life hellish for the residents of the flats on Eureka Street. He clearly needed help. And, the neighbors and supervisor say, he clearly didn’t get it.
On March 5, a neighbor called 911 — yet again — after hearing screaming from 112 Eureka. Ruiz regularly visited a tenant in that unit, and they often fought loudly, neighbors said.
Police officers arrived at 11:32 a.m. and, according to a statement from the department, “made contact with an adult male armed with a knife who fled from the officers.” As they searched for him, they noticed smoke coming from a building on the block and summoned the Fire Department.
What happened over the course of the next few hours is murky, but police with shields, rifles and dogs evacuated numerous homes in the area to search for the suspect. Police said they took Ruiz into custody at 2:23 p.m.
King took a photo near the start of the commotion that shows a man he says he recognized as Ruiz standing on the back balcony of 112 Eureka. In the photo, the man on the balcony is naked and has a yellow tourniquet tied to his upper left arm as black smoke billows above his head.
Rachel Marshall, a spokesperson for the district attorney, said police had not booked Ruiz for any crimes since 2017. But numerous neighbors said police responded to their block for complaints about Ruiz again and again. It appears this is one more example of police knowing about a disturbed person, but not having the tools to address the problem until a predictable catastrophe strikes.
Ruiz is being represented by Deputy Public Defender Chris FoxLent, who said Ruiz was experiencing a schizophrenic episode the morning of March 5. FoxLent said there was no crisis occurring when police arrived, but that police insisted on entering 112 Eureka, and one officer drew his gun and pointed it at Ruiz.
“This predictably escalated the situation and is a clear example of problems caused when police respond to mental health situations,” FoxLent said in a statement, adding it was officers’ insistence on entering the apartment that led to the true crisis.
For a supposedly innovative, progressive city, San Francisco is still doing little to address rampant mental health and drug addiction issues and seems to waffle between ignoring them or leaving them to police officers who are ill equipped to handle them. Too often, officials throw up their hands until a crime occurs, and our jail system continues to be disproportionately filled with people who have mental health problems or are addicted to drugs. And they’re often released without the treatment they need.
“I fear that he’ll be back in the neighborhood before I am,” said King, who is bracing for the double whammy of dealing with his insurance company and getting rebuilding permits from the city’s notoriously slow Department of Building Inspection.
King, who works in special projects for the city’s Public Works Department, has worked at City Hall since 2005. He also served as a legislative aide to former Supervisor Bevan Dufty and as a policy adviser to former Mayor Gavin Newsom, now California’s governor. If someone as well connected as him can’t get help for a bubbling neighborhood crisis, nobody can.
“I know the system inside and out. Imagine pleading for help from exactly the right people and this still happens,” he said. “How can there not be a plan? No more thoughts, prayers and task forces. Where is the plan?”
There are finally small beginnings of a plan including the city’s new street crisis teams which aim to solve drug and mental health crises without relying on police officers. Clearly, those need to be expanded as quickly as possible. The longdiscussed meth sobering center is finally planned to open this fall, and a longdiscussed psychiatric respite center should open next month. (“Longdiscussed” could be a descriptor of pretty much anything related to City Hall.)
“We’re going at a horseandbuggy pace, and it feels like we need to be in a race car,” Supervisor Rafael Mandelman said.
His district includes Eureka Street, and he visited King’s block a couple of years ago to hear neighbors’ concerns about Ruiz.
“This seems like Exhibit A for what we think is wrong with how our systems are failing to help people like Lucian,” Mandelman said. “Lucian is sick. The nonintervention in his life has not helped him and has caused serious harm.”
Very serious harm. Beth Clark, who lived in the apartment underneath 112 Eureka with her husband and two boys, said that when the fire was put out and Ruiz was apprehended, officials said her home would probably be broken into and ransacked that night because burned homes usually are in the city.
They allowed her to grab some valuables, and she saw water pouring into her apartment from upstairs and the ceiling falling in.
“I was sobbing. It was terrible,” she said. “Seeing the destruction of it all and knowing it was totally preventable.
“The police were very upset that they’d been dealing with this guy for so long,” she continued. “I said, ‘Hopefully, this arson thing will get him put away for a long time,’ and an officer said, ‘Don’t count on it.’ But he set the house on fire knowing there were children right below him.”
Clark said she called 911 about Ruiz 10 or 15 times over the years, and her husband had called several more times. Randall Kikukawa and his husband lived below Clark’s apartment, and he said he saw Ruiz many times over the years, sometimes sleeping on his stoop, sometimes mumbling to himself and sometimes screaming and cursing.
Kikukawa likened the city’s inability to help Ruiz to its inability to address dangerous streets until after a pedestrian has died. Then, there’s a new stoplight or a new crosswalk, but only then.
“There’s no proactive response. Only reactive,” he said. “After this fire, after he’s been arrested, after everything, now we’re doing something about it?”