San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Nathaniel Andre Watkins Jr. 49
Age: Time of death:
p.m.
Location:
March 11, 6:41
California Pacific Medical Center, after an overdose at his encampment at 100 Larkin St. Cause of overdose: Probable methamphetamine
When Malkia George met Nathaniel Watkins Jr., he was 18 and she was a year older. They passed each other on a San Francisco street and exchanged numbers. She liked him immediately. Two days later, Watkins called her from jail. He would spend the next six years behind bars, but when he was released in 1998, the pair moved in together. They would later marry, and she would take his name.
“He was very interesting, and I was young and good girls like bad guys,” George-Watkins said in a recent interview. “His mindset was hood. He was a street guy. But he was very intelligent.”
She didn’t know it at the time, but he was using cocaine as well as snorting heroin through a Visine bottle. She learned his drug use had started early, during a tough childhood.
Growing up in the Tenderloin, both his parents were addicted to drugs, George-Watkins said. His mother asked him to score crack cocaine for her when he was as young as 8. By 12, Watkins told his wife, he and a family member were smoking crack together.
“He had a really hard life from the gate,” she said. “He would have to feed his three little sisters because his mom was too high.”
When he wasn’t in survival mode as a child, he liked to sing and break-dance. He joined a five-man B-boy crew, Demons of the Mind, according to an obituary posted online by his family. He worked at a print and copy shop, and in his early teens at a Winchell’s Donut House. His mother and father eventually achieved sobriety, and he started working construction with his dad, “Big Nate.”
Watkins spent much of his adult life incarcerated. A few years after his first stint in jail, he returned to prison, spending the next 16 years and nine months there. While the teenage sweethearts were now married, George-Watkins said, her partner’s drug use worsened in prison. “He’s very charming and very, very, very sweet,” she said, “when he’s not on drugs.”
Upon her husband’s release in 2017, George-Watkins drove to San Luis Obispo and picked him up. They argued the whole way home. “I had been out here living in the real world, and he was in there living in his world,” she said. He had become “institutionalized,” she said. He’d lock himself in her bathroom for hours, preferring the confinement.
George-Watkins, a hairstylist for 28 years, got him a janitorial job, but he quickly lost it. And when she left for 10 days to attend to a family emergency in Mississippi, he bottomed out. He began staying out late and doing drugs. She protested that she couldn’t have that in her house while raising her daughter. He claimed the foil he was heating with a torch held crushed pain pills for his injured back, but she knew he was smoking fentanyl. “He lied all the way to his grave,” she said.
“You gotta pick the streets or home,” she said she told him. “You can’t do both.” Ultimately, he lived on the streets, though George-Watkins would still bring him food and let him shower at her house.
His wife shared a photo taken of him during this time in a security uniform, complete with a badge and an earpiece. He wasn’t actually a guard, but used the outfit to shoplift more easily as his addiction worsened.
In March, George-Watkins got a phone call from California Pacific Medical Center. He was on life support after his overdose, and she had to make the call to let him go. “You hear how hard that decision is,” she said, “but until you are in it, you don’t realize how difficult it really is.”