Body of Fatally Stabbed Man Found on Bernal Hill



SFGate reports:



Paramedics went to the scene and declared the victim dead.





The Examiner adds:


Bernalwood will update this story as additional details become available.




35 thoughts on “Body of Fatally Stabbed Man Found on Bernal Hill

  1. What on earth are you talking about? Parking, legal or illegal has nothing to do with it. It’s most likely that the decedent was victim of a random robbery or that it was a drug deal gone bad. Those two scenarios account for almost 100% of these cases.

    • Since you are not informed, I will tell you. And if you still don’t believe me, I will take you on a stroll at 5am and show you.
      The overnight parking has a lot to do with the violence on Bernal Hill Park. I walk a lot of early morning laps around Bernal Park over the past 6 years (probably in the 1000s) The issues I’ve seen: people having sex in cars, sex in the bushes, housed being cased while someone waits in an idling car, illegal dumping, etc.
      Overnight parking is an issues because since overnight parking has been instituted in other parts of The City, ‘night-owls’ gravitate here and cause problems.
      1) people sleeping in cars ofter dump their trash before they drive off
      2) the ability to drive to Bernal and park/idle late at night gives people an easy ‘getaway’ route
      3) the cars/campers/trucks block visual access to the areas where the crimes actually happen
      4) campers/trucks effectively cause shadows and limit visibility from street lamps
      5) having a sign posted saying that there is no parking from 2am to 6am effectively tells people that someone may be patrolling the area nightly between those times with less obstructive views
      6) I’ve seen people ‘case’ houses on Bernal while some sits in an idling getaway car
      7) the ability to drive up the Bernal after the bars close and continue to drink/party
      8) the rapid access and easy access from one part of the HIll to the other gives easy escape routes
      9) as overnight parking become banned in other parts of SF and South SF, it increases in Bernal…more people…more crime in general

      Rarely do I see officers driving on patrol, and I’ve never seen them on foot. These drive by patrols are ineffective because it’s easy to see them coming on the long straights. The police cannot see behind the vehicles, and there are blind spots.

      Most of the crimes occur at night between 2am and 6am. People committing these crimes do not ambulate up the Bernal Hill, they drive. And they drive because they know they can park, walk a short distance to the shadows in an open space without camera, and have easy access to their cars.

      So yes Mr Kaye, parking is the biggest and easiest preventable issue in regard to preventing the uptake in crime, especially violent crime, in Bernal.

      • It’s human nature for us to believe that what we observe of the world is all there is. I’m sorry that your thousands of nighttime visits to Bernal Hill have been so apocalyptic. (It sounds like darkness brings a literal army of criminals and moral degenerates intent on lasciviousness! We should definitely make like the town in Footloose and ban something!)

        However, your experience is not universal. There are many legitimate visits to public parks at all times of the night. Shift workers deserve access like everyone else; as do insomniacs, astronomers, people who love to watch the sunrise, night-time kitefliers…

        This terrible crime absolutely does not change the statistically nonexistent risk of violent crime to Bernal residents. Furthermore, there is no way to demonstrate correlation between parking and violent crime, much less causation.

        Please do not react to an extremely rare incident by calling for removal of yet another public liberty.

      • But….it’s just as likely that the poor guy’s body was driven here and dumped, along with the blade.

  2. Looking at the rest of the story posted here (it didn’t make to my email alert), I’d say that it’s a drug deal gone bad, given the excessive stabbing. A robbery would have resulted in something less severe because the perpetrator wouldn’t want to stay around.

    As for overnight parking, there are times when a person MUST sleep in their car. In the past 2 years I’ve had to do it twice, once when there was a crime scene on Treasure Island and I couldn’t get across the Bay Bridge from a late night outing because the entire bridge was blocked off. Another time the engine of my car suddenly quit (ignition computer failed) and I wanted to be close to my repair shop, so I had my car towed to the street in front of the shop, and slept in my car until the shop opened in the morning.

    • I agree, the problem isn’t that overnight parking is still allowed on Bernal Hill, the problem is that the city has been banning it elsewhere. People that need to park and sleep in their vehicles aren’t doing it simply as a past time, this is part of the city’s recent agenda at pushing out individuals that are too poor to afford housing and find themselves in need of staying in their vehicles.

    • Thank you for your expert opinion. Did you you actually see the crime scene? Are you trained in forensics? Or do you just watch a lot of CSI?

      As for overnight parking. As it has become banned in other parts of The City. Bernal has become a magnet. There are regulars who camp there. Uber/Lyft drivers from the suburbs sleep out there, then just before they leave, the dump their trash. The volume of people is now the problem.

  3. Any word on the identity of the victim? Just because the body was found there does mean the crime took place there. A stabbing as bad as what is described seems like there’s going to be evidence around. But if the victim was transported there and left…though if someone were dumping a body they’d probably not leave it out in the open, along with a weapon.

    • Amy.. why? Why make this about parking? And could we please save the low-effort pejoratives for Twitter combat; you’re talking with your neighbors here. (I’m sure you’d like most all of them in person.)

    • Why are you calling someone a snowflake? I’m still puzzled by the usage of this word. It sounds derogatory and not helpful in a dialogue.

      I’ve read several Negative definitions and the worst references the ashes of holocaust victims floating down.

      Really? This is helpful ?

      I’m sorry for this victim and I’m saddened that our lovely hill is treated so poorly.

  4. That is terrible. I love the hill and having two deaths there in three years is awful. My sympathies to the victim’s family and friends.

    I can understand that the neighbor who found this person is quite reasonably upset and probably scared. I don’t think that means that s/he or Bernalwood should be advocating a position on parking with respect to this murder. I lived on Ellsworth at Powhattan for five years. I had to park up there sometimes. Furthermore, my mother became homeless in her twenties to escape an abusive husband. She slept in her car because she had nowhere else to go.

    There are folks who sleep in their cars over on the north/east side of the hill as well. I walk my dog at 5:30am and see folks in their cars on streets I won’t name, because I don’t want them pushed off to a less safe place. These folks have included women, folks who are clearly employed (uniforms in the car/on them) and even a family in a van. They are having a really really hard time. I know some of us are afraid of homeless people and that crime in our neighborhood is scary, but the lives of the folks I see in these cars in the morning are also very scary. They’re vulnerable and I don’t think we should be jumping to blame them before the facts are available.

    The police don’t think this was random. Let’s hear what our supervisor can tell us next week, in addition to what police can tell us, and try not to panic in the meanwhile, as upsetting as this is. Wishing all of our neighbors and park users a safe experience on the hill and in the nbhd.

  5. Surprised we don’t have even a minor update. Was it someone just walking their dog and randomly got killed? I think we would have heard a more dire warning if that was the case.

    • The police say they do NOT believe it was random. They do not typically release much about homicides until they have made progress in the investigation.


    There may be a connection between parking on BH Blvd. and “quality of life” crimes, but it’s irresponsible and inflammatory to link parking to this murder on the basis of what’s known at this point.

  7. So many people commented on this story for the purposes of defending overnight parkers, you’d think they would finally lose the violin and stick up for their neighborhood when a literal murder occurs… sf is a finite geographical area with high demand for residency and most houses owned by middle-income families, not everything is a classist melodrama, please step back and lose the housing-crisis lense for once. There is no doubt that transients sleeping overnight in RVs and large vehicles create an environment conducive to crime and pollute our beautiful urban ecosystem, and we deserve to protect our human neighbors and our wild neighbors by banning overnight parking on the top of bernal.

    • They aren’t “transients,” they’re people. Human neighbors, if you will. How is jumping to likely bullshit conclusions about parking on the hill sticking up for Bernal?

      • Transient is not a derogatory term, it is simply the accurate definition of someone without a home who sleeps in public places and moves around. Many are simply down on their luck, and we need more places where they can safely park overnight and sleep. We have a man on our st in NW bernal who lives in his van on our street, we know him and his dogs and we’re all cool with it. These people aren’t the issue, and ignoring the actual crime in your backyard in some theoretical defense of the percentage of transients who are not committing crimes and polluting does us all a disservice. Allowing rampant crime and blight isn’t a solution, it’s a cop-out.

      • One can dismiss tendentious rhetoric without ignoring substantive issues. As I’m doing here.

        Regardless of the definition of transient, you are using it in a derogatory manner. In your first post, “people” would have conveyed the same point.

      • Harrison: No, you don’t deserve to get to ban parking because you believe it promotes something or other. People visit the hill and other public parks for legitimate reasons at all times of day and night.

        When did “banning” things become such a nonchalant idea around here?

      • Golden Gate Park closes at 10pm. Are you advocating that people should be able to hang out on Bernal Hill at any hour?

      • Banning parking on a street in the middle of the neighborhood, a street which abuts houses along its length, is not the same as closing a park. This proposal is akin to banning parking on Lincoln, Stanyan, and Fulton when Golden Gate Park is closed.

      • Sorry you’re ignorant to the biodiversity found on Bernal, yes it is a functioning urban ecosystem full of plants and animals endemic only
        to our small franciscan chert grassland biome in this small region of the bay area.

      • Looks like you’re doubling down Harrison. True, the bay area is an ecosystem…but that doesn’t mean you’re not being melodramatic…lol

    • Shouldn’t there be a locked gate at Bernal Heights Blvd and Carver St ? Why do any cars need to be on that stretch of Bernal Heights Blvd?

  8. From the perspective of your location far, far off-topic, can you see how your assumptions about Rachel are unearned and impolite?

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