“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see?”
— Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass
On Feb. 25, 2025, San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins announced that her office secured the conviction of 45-year-old Danic Vaivai by jury trial for viciously assaulting a 69-year-old woman in an unprovoked attack on Dec. 7, 2022. Vaivai was convicted of elder abuse and inflicted great bodily injury on the victim. “The jury’s verdict delivers justice to the victim in this case who was viciously assaulted in an unprovoked attack,” Jenkins said. “I hope that the jury’s verdict brings the victim some closure as she heals from this assault. My office will continue to do everything we can to keep our seniors and other vulnerable communities safe.”
In a now all too familiar random attack in San Francisco, Vaivai viciously and without warning punched the victim on the side of the head as she was walking, causing her to immediately fall to the ground, where Vaivai kicked her in the head. She called out for help and a neighbor came out, but Vaivai told the neighbor to “go back to your room.” Vaivai then returned to where the victim was still struggling on the ground. She pleaded with him to stop, to which Vaivai responded, “I’m going to hit you again and then again!” Vaivai then proceeded to brutally kick and punch her. The victim sustained a fractured jaw, orbital, sinus cavity, and substantial bruising to her right eye.
Vaivai has two other arrests in San Francisco; in 2016 he was arrested for murder (yes, you read that correctly), and in 2018 he was arrested for battery with serious bodily injury, assault with a deadly weapon likely to produce great bodily harm, warrants on hold, and assault with any means of force likely to produce great bodily harm. The recent case against Vaivai was successfully prosecuted by Assistant District Attorney Samantha Adhikari, who happens to be the same attorney in the case against Zavein Blue Wright, the man who viciously assaulted Voice of San Francisco editor Lynette Majer’s husband, Ken Majer. The crime is also similar: on Oct. 5, 2023, Wright forcefully knocked Ken to the sidewalk where his head hit the sidewalk, requiring 17 staples to close the wound. A neighbor, Craig Pennington, followed Wright and pointed him out to police officers, who took him into custody.
Like Vaivai, Wright has a criminal record, though it is much longer, including four arrests for false imprisonment by violence and four arrests for assault with any means of force likely to produce great bodily injury. “I am in awe of the victim’s resilience and power in overcoming a vicious and unprovoked attack,” Adhikari said after Vaivai was convicted. “I am grateful to her for sharing her story and also incredibly grateful to the jury ultimately concluding that the defendant should be held accountable for his conduct.” In Wright’s case, however, there will be no trial by jury, no conviction, and no prison time. The difference? Wright was found mentally incompetent to stand trial by Charles Crompton, the notoriously lenient judge who oversees San Francisco’s Behavioral Health Court.
“There is no disposition in this case, rather a Mental Health Ruling. Criminal proceedings have been suspended…” Oscar Gonzalez, a victim advocate for elder abuse in the Victim Services Division of the District Attorney’s Office, told Ken in an email. The public defender recommended 90 days at Baker Street House, a residential treatment facility “dedicated to providing comprehensive mental health and substance use disorder treatment services.”
Nancy Tung, chief of the Vulnerable Victims Unit for the District Attorney’s Office, objected to Wright’s release. The onus for protection was put upon Ken, with Gonzales asking, “Do you have a safety plan?” followed by, “This will be ongoing — do you want a therapist to talk to? Do you have cameras in and around your home? Are you comfortable calling 911? Do you know where the nearest police station is? Do you carry pepper spray or mace?” The only court measure has proven not particularly reassuring: a criminal protective order requiring Wright to stay 150 yards away from Ken and from Pennington, the neighbor who identified Wright for the police. All of this begs the question, if Judge Crompton considers Wright too mentally unstable to stand trial, why would he respect a stay-away order?
I asked Board of Supervisors president and longtime mental health advocate Rafael Mandelman why San Francisco is incapable of filling the cracks the violent mentally ill slip through over and over again. When he was a child, Mandelman’s own mother was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, schizoaffective disorder, and borderline personality disorder, and suffered psychotic episodes. “She was on every pharmaceutical concoction known to man,” Mandelman told the Chronicle in an interview. “I remember lots of her crying and spending days in bed.”
By the time he was 9 years old, Mandelman said he often had to walk into town to find food. By the time he was 10, his mom was in and out of the hospital regularly. Mandelman and his relatives decided when he was 11 that he should try living with his paternal grandmother in San Francisco, but she was too elderly to care for him, so he lived with a classmate’s mother, then a foster family, and finally, his English teacher at Lick-Wilmerding High School and her husband. The couple took him in until he was accepted to the prestigious Yale University.
It is this very personal experience that gives Mandelman an extra passionate push to change the system, but he is also realistic. “We are in this sort of Alice in Wonderland space where nothing is as it should be,” Mandelman told me in a phone interview. “Fixing it would require a major overhaul. A fair number of people you could make an argument for conservatorship — 50 people in jail a year could probably be conserved. But we don’t have anywhere to put them. State hospitals went from around 40,000 beds at their height to 5,000 today. Everything is closed down.”
Besides a lack of placement options, there are budget concerns. “On one hand I’m pushing for San Francisco to do more, but I think it’s really hard for a municipality to do this on our own,” Mandelman explained. “Laguna Honda is paid for by Medicaid to offer skilled nursing care for the indigent in wheelchairs; it would violate their license to take mentally ill patients, and Medicaid won’t pay for it. When we lock them up it costs $200,000 to $300,000 a year for a bed — that is on taxpayers and not reimbursable. Locally we have 140 people in locked subacute facilities. We need 50 to 100 more beds, but it would cost $10 million to $20 million for those extra beds. Even then, it’s like freeways: if you build them, they will fill up.”
Of Proposition 1, narrowly passed by voters in 2024 to improve access to behavioral health services, Mandelman said, “It doesn’t solve the operating costs. The state has to pay for it or come up with a way to compel the counties to do it. Medicare has exclusions for facilities that are primarily more than 16 beds, for mental health. The counties are all on their own. The state’s move to push people out of state prisons into county custody is the same as when they closed the mental institutions.”
Call to expand behavioral placements for ‘complex clients’ as victims feel helpless
This past January, Supervisor Mandelman and former Mayor London Breed collaborated with experts to publish recommended next steps for securing long-term treatment for the severely mentally ill. The workgroup called for urgent leveraging of state funding to expand behavioral placements for “complex clients,” determining a need to add 75 to 135 beds in the next two years “among long-term locked care and residential care settings that support adults with complex mental health and/or substance use disorders.” Locked care facilities are for individuals who are mandated for treatment by a criminal or civil court judge and typically have “secured exits and monitored perimeters.” These facilities take on some of the most behaviorally complex clients, the study says, including individuals who are “incompetent to stand trial, under conservatorship, or registered sex offenders.”
Just like Mandelman, the study points to the lack of reimbursement as an enormous challenge. “Unlike skilled nursing facilities, where the cost of placements is often reimbursable through Medicaid or Medicare, San Francisco must cover the cost of expanding and operating the types of long-term placements needed through local funding sources and the General Fund. This is due to current state and federal funding limitations. Although the state, through Proposition 1, will offer limited, one-time capital funds for expanding certain types of facilities, the workgroup acknowledged that the operational costs of added placements must be borne by county general funds or local sources. This creates a strong disincentive and budgeting challenge for San Francisco or any other county looking to expand its supply of these high-cost beds.”
In December 2024, San Francisco applied for more than $140 million in one-time capital funds for several new projects through the Proposition 1 Bond Behavioral Health Continuum Infrastructure Program (Bond BHCIP). If awarded, these grants would result in an increase of as many as 100 new long-term locked treatment beds added to the system of care. While that sounds encouraging, it doesn’t offer victims of the violent mentally ill — victims like Ken Majer — any comfort. “I don’t know what to do,” Ken told me over coffee at Starbucks in the Presidio, not far from where he was attacked by Wright. “This has changed my life. I don’t feel safe. I feel helpless, like I have no rights and no recourse. I feel like maybe I should sue the city for not doing enough to protect me from this guy who has clearly been a danger to the public for years.”
While it sounds extreme, it may become the norm. On Jan. 22, 2025, the family of Corazon Dandan, a Daly City woman who was purposely pushed into the path of a BART train in San Francisco last year, announced it was suing the agency for wrongful death and elder abuse, alleging that the transit operator’s failure to address riders’ safety needs. Dandan was waiting for a Millbrae-bound train at the Powell Street BART station on the night of July 1, 2024, when she was shoved into the path of an oncoming train by a 49-year-old mentally ill homeless man named Trevor Belmont, now charged in her death. In 2018, a judge ordered Belmont to stay away from BART stations following a conviction of lewd conduct. According to public records, Belmont was arrested nearly 30 times across the Bay Area over the past two decades. After he was ordered to stay away from BART trains and stations for three years in 2018, Belmont repeatedly violated the order. In June 2018 he was booked into jail after officers saw him “swinging his closed fists at BART patrons on the platform of the Dublin/Pleasanton BART Station,” court records state.
BART wasn’t the only place Belmont had problems — in 2013, a judge ordered him to stay away from San Francisco State University for three years after an assault and battery on a member of the university community. That same year, a San Francisco jury found him guilty of lewd conduct and indecent exposure and he was sentenced to probation. In 2014, a judge ordered him to receive mental health counseling and to stay away from St. Monica’s Catholic School. In 2023, Belmont received his toughest punishment yet, not in San Francisco but in San Mateo County, when he was sentenced to jail after accepting a plea deal for a vandalism charge.
As the lines between mental illness, substance abuse, and violent criminal behavior grow blurrier and more treacherous by the day, Mandelman understands the frustration felt by victims and their families. “The public would like to see us do more. We are not dealing with any of them effectively. I want deterrence and safety for the public. The criminal justice system usually fails; violent people come out all the time. When you’re sentenced for a crime like assault, it’s not indefinite … at some point you’re going to be released, and that’s bad for the next person. Neither system is meeting the safety needs for the public, and it’s a huge problem. There are people who there may not be basis to hold them on a particular case, but they are an ongoing danger and could be a case for conserving. That’s not happening. It’s a very high bar. Things are seriously broken.”
Follow Susan and the Marina Times on X: @SusanDReynolds and @TheMarinaTimes.
