Scores walk by as man lies dead on busy street
Payal Gupta lives in a second story apartment on the corner of Webster and Bush streets, where her days pounding away on a laptop are accompanied by the bustle of Lower Pacific Heights outside her windows: Drivers zipping past, residents coming and going, construction crews working on neighboring buildings.
Amid the everyday whir of San Francisco, at roughly 2:30 p.m. on Feb. 4, something caught her eye. A man in blue shorts, tall and skinny, was lying under a bush in a grassy median between traffic lanes on Webster Street.
He was on his right side, clutching his backpack. She figured he was a homeless person taking a nap on a surface more comfortable than
concrete. She kept working.
Hours passed, and still the man didn’t move. Gupta didn’t feel comfortable checking on him herself, especially as night fell. She figured that hundreds — maybe thousands — of other people had seen him too. Cars at the busy intersection stopped inches from his feet. Surely, somebody would do something. Apparently, nobody did.
Gupta grew worried.
“I was just like, ‘Oh my god, this guy actually has not moved at all,’ ” Gupta, 41, recalled. “I didn’t know what was happening.”
She called 311. An operator transferred her to 911. It was 9:23 p.m.
The dispatcher told her police would come by to check on the man. Gupta declined to give her name or phone number, and they ended the call. The dispatcher assigned code 910. That meant no crime was suspected, and police officers would perform a wellbeing check as soon as they were available.
But an hour later, Gupta had seen no sign of them. She said she called again at 10:30 p.m., and the dispatcher said police would be there soon.
According to the Department of Emergency Management, police arrived at the intersection at 10:51 p.m. and reported that they couldn’t locate the man by 11:05 p.m. The call was cleared.
Gupta kept looking out her window. The man remained in the median, motionless. She called 911 again at 12:50 a.m.
“I’m like, ‘Oh my god! What the hell is going on?’ ” she recalled. “They said, ‘Somebody did come by, but they didn’t find anybody.’ I said, ‘What do you mean? How could you not see this person?’ ”
This time, she agreed to leave her name and phone number. The dispatcher sent police back to the scene. After they arrived at 1:12 a.m., they found the man and called an ambulance. Code Three. An emergency. Lights and sirens.
Medics arrived at the median at 1:19 a.m. They pronounced the man dead four minutes later — exactly four hours after Gupta first called for help.
Gupta watched from her window. Officials taped off the area. They moved the man’s body into the road and covered it with a yellow tarp. The coroner arrived at 2:19 a.m. An ambulance took the man’s body to the morgue. The scene was cleared by 2:49 a.m.
The medical examiner’s office later identified the man as Dustin Walker. He was 37 and homeless. His cause of death is under investigation.
Gupta couldn’t sleep much after the ambulance carried Walker’s body away. He’d been in the street for more than 12 hours. In the middle of a busy city. How many of those hours had he been dead?
She was angry. Partly at the slow police response. Partly at herself for not calling 911 far earlier. (“There was no reason for me to wait,” she said in hindsight.) And partly at her fellow San Franciscans for doing even less.
“I saw people walk by and look over and walk away as if it was nothing,” she said.
The next day, she placed a bouquet of white daisies in the median with a cardboard sign reading, “Guy lay dead here & no one noticed.” She wrote a post on Nextdoor titled, “Dead person in the bushes.”
“This is a difficult post for me to write,” she began before explaining what had happened. “Hundreds of people walked by him, bicycled by him, drove past him . ... The guy was dead, and no one noticed.”
Scores of neighbors responded, several of them saying they’d seen people appearing to be asleep or unconscious on the street many times and had not known what to do.
Amid San Francisco’s triple crisis of homelessness, mental illness and drug addiction, it’s common to see people in distress or simply passed out on the sidewalk. It’s such a familiar sight that many of us just walk on by. But we shouldn’t. Not in this supposedly compassionate city.
Mary Ellen Carroll, executive director of the Department of Emergency Management, said it’s important to call 911 when somebody appears to be experiencing a medical crisis. It’s best to give information that is as clear and detailed as possible, she said. And to leave your name and number, which will never be shared, in case police officers or paramedics need more information.
“To people who are willing to make those calls, thank you,” she said. “You may save a life.”
She said authorities had technically followed the city’s protocols in the case of the man in the median, but that the response should have been better.
“This was a tragedy, and the systems that we have obviously didn’t work well to address this particular situation,” she said. “Nobody should have to be alone like that in the street for that long. Let it be a wakeup call for all of us to keep our eyes open and not become numb.”
It is this kind of scenario that prompted the city to recently launch its Street Crisis Response Team to respond to crises without relying on police. Each team is made up of three people: a paramedic, a clinician and “a behavioral health peer” who may have been homeless or struggled with addiction or mental health issues in the past.
There are currently two teams, mostly working in the Tenderloin, Castro and Mission, and the plan, Carroll said, is to hire more teams to provide 24/7, citywide coverage by this summer.
Gupta said she still thinks about Walker often as she works in her window overlooking the median. She still can’t believe he was there for at least 11 hours before anybody realized he was dead.
“We’ve become so desensitized to all of this,” Gupta said. “You find a dead person on the side of the road, and it’s just another day here in the city.”