San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Artist’s injuries underscore traffic danger
Madonna was blissfully excited on the evening of Nov. 6. Her husband, Paul, was heading home from his art studio to cook his specialty — steak, potatoes and broccolini — before driving her to the airport for a flight to Tulum, Mexico, for a women’s retreat.
But a phone call from a stranger would change everying thing. A woman told her there’d been a horrible crash. She could hear Paul’s voice in the background. “I’m in the park!” he yelled. “I’ve been hit! Please come!”
Every 14 hours, on average, a crash on San Francisco’s dangerous streets sends somebody severely injured to San Francisco General Hospital, upturnJoen their lives and those of the people who love them. The talented surgeons there usually save them, and their horrific stories don’t make headlines.
But that night, the badly injured person would not go unnoticed. He was artist Paul Madonna, famous in San Francisco for his intricate drawings of city scenes ranging from the
Palace of Fine Arts to the Golden Gate Bridge. He drew the series All Over Coffee in The Chronicle for 12 years and has published five books including the 2020 tome “Spirits of San Francisco” with historian Gary Kamiya.
Joen Madonna, also a powerhouse in the San Francisco arts
world as the executive director of ArtSpan, raced with a friend to Mansell Street and Brazil Avenue on the edge of McLaren Park.
“For us to be in line following behind ambulances and fire trucks and police knowing it was for my husband ...” she told me, her voice trailing off.
She arrived as Paul was being loaded into an ambulance, his face covered in blood. “I’m here, Paul!” she called out as paramedics drove him away. Three sisters had witnessed the crash and called 911. One sister called Joen, and they all stayed until she arrived and told her what they’d seen.
Paul had been driving home to the Excelsior from his Bayview art studio in his Smartcar when a Mercedes-Benz speeding at 65 mph in the wrong direction slammed into him head-on. The driver behind Paul then hit him from the back.
San Francisco police confirmed that officers from Ingleside Station responded to the scene at 7:20 p.m. and said three victims were transported in ambulances, two with lifethreatening injuries and one with non-life-threatening injuries. Police would not provide the names of the other two victims or their conditions. The driver of the Mercedes fled on foot, and no arrests have been made.
Police said anyone with information should call 415575-4444 and can remain anonymous.
Paul, who turned 50 in September, underwent four hours of emergency surgery at S.F. General. The crash injured his liver and spleen, shoved his stomach into his diaphragm and sent other organs into his lungs. He sustained a brain bleed and a torn carotid artery.
He remains in the intensive care unit of the hospital with a broken nose, shattered right heel and nerve pain in his left leg. He’s expected to recover, but will probably be in a wheelchair for several months and will need time at a rehab center before going home.
Joen was sitting in Paul’s hospital room when we started our phone interview, but moved to sit on the floor in the hallway at his request. He couldn’t stand to hear the details of his crash.
She said that until the gruesome collision, the couple’s 21 years of marriage had been smooth and trauma-free. Nothing bad had happened. They had never been in the hospital. Paul had never had any kind of surgery. She tries to focus on a bit of good news: His priceless right hand, the one that’s created so much beauty, remained unscathed.
“He works a lot — it’s really his lifeblood, and it’s a huge part of his purpose in life and his identity,” she said. “It’s just so shocking to know that so much of that is going to be changed for quite a while.”
She’s spends seven hours a day at Paul’s bedside, the most allowed under COVID restrictions, and said that her husband is struggling emotionally but trying to remain in good spirits.
“He has times of being quite alert and energetic and we have nice, semi-lively conversations and some laughter, but he definitely goes into cycles of tiredness and being on medications that are pretty intense,” she said. “He asks me once a day to stay in the moment because he can’t think about the long term and how many months we have ahead of us.”
She praised the city for rallying around the couple — the police for their thorough investigation, the doctors for their lifesaving care, the nurses for their help and kindness, a friend for putting up Paul’s parents from Pittsburgh, and many in the community for contributing to a GoFundMe created for the couple.
Joen said that while she’s touched by people’s kindness, she’s livid that one speeding driver wreaked so much havoc and hasn’t been caught. She said drivers have gotten more reckless lately and need to realize how much pain they can cause — and that it’s especially upsetting that people race through a family-filled park like it’s a highway.
“People are running stop signs, they’re running red lights, they’re speeding. They’re doing doughnuts in the middle of the road. It’s really out of control,” she said.
“We’re in a civil society,” she continued. “We don’t have vigilante justice anymore. We have a criminal justice system we believe in, and I really hope justice gets served for the enormous amount of pain and suffering that Paul’s going through.”
Kate Patterson, spokesperson for the San Francisco Public Library and a longtime friend of the couple’s, created the GoFundMe for them. She told me Paul is very focused, disciplined and cerebral — and has worked hard to remain in this increasingly unaffordable city as an artist. She said it’s important for San Franciscans to support the man who’s boosted their city.
“San Francisco just gets trashed all the time, and he is someone who is constantly uplifting the beauty of this place and reminding us why it is so special,” she said.
Kamiya, another good friend of Paul’s, said working on “Spirits of San Francisco” with him was a delight. The two would venture together to “weird, obscure places” in the city where Paul would create “really accurate, but surreal” images.
“It’s going to be a long haul for the poor guy. I feel terrible,” Kamiya said. “Paul is a San Francisco treasure.”