Hey, remember angry Sarah Nome, the lady who refused to move out of the Kaiser hospital in Marin for over a year, and ran up a $1.4 million bill? Well, Kaiser's 1) gotten ownership of her house in San Anselmo and 2) will be auctioning it off to pay off her tab. Kaiser was awarded the house after Nome was put in the care of the state (after her daughter refused to take her in), and has been paying the mortgage while their case against Nome was pending -- even though they haven't actually been given access to the place. The house isn't in the best of shape -- it's apparently been hit by falling trees and Nome was in a fight with her insurance to get them to pay for it -- but given the real estate market in Marin, we're guessing it'll probably move fairly quickly. more ›

The latest weekend murder in SF: At around noon on Saturday, a 66-year-old Asian man was shot to death after a road rage incident in Viz Valley. Witnesses say the man was arguing with three men in their late teens or early 20s after a fender bender right before the shots were fired. After shooting the man, at least one of the suspects then stole the man's car. The car was later recovered; the cops say someone tried to torch it, but failed. more ›

...And that's not even the curviest part! A car chase that started in Marin County around 3:00 a.m. Monday morning ended abruptly when the driver, speeding at around 75 mph over the Golden Gate Bridge, overshot the turn from Doyle Drive onto Lombard Street and flipped over. A open fifth of Hennessey was found in the car, and the passengers are in SF General with non-fatal injuries. more ›

Remember the Jamba Juice hepatitis A scare? And remember how we said there were gymnasts competing in a national meet in San Jose a few weeks ago? Well -- you guessed it -- it turns out the gymnasts might have been exposed to the virus. The hepatitis A carrier made smoothies for the gymnasts during the meet and in the trade shows outside. She claims she used good hygiene and food safety practices throughout (wearing gloves, for instance), so the chance of infection is fairly low, but they're warning gymnasts anyways. Hey, while we're on the topic of gymnasts, does anyone else remember the movie ? So good. more ›

First up, remember May Zhou, the Stanford graduate student who was found dead in her car trunk in Santa Rosa? Well, her father remains convinced it was not a suicide, and cites a private autopsy report he's commissioned that shows blunt force trauma injuries. The offical police report, by contrast, showed no trauma injuries but did indicate toxic levels of Benadryl in her system. Zhou's father will not name the pathologist who conducted the private autopsy, or release his report to the police, though, saying it would jeopardize the investigation. The police say they will certainly look into the matter again and see if a murder was in fact committed. more ›

[sorry we're late today!] more ›

Huh -- remember that huge fight we all got into about whether or not to put cameras at high-crime intersections in SF? Turns out the cameras at the public housing sites are pretty much useless. To wit, they've only been used for evidence in two cases, neither of which were the homicides that they said the cameras would help solve. Whether this is because cameras don't deter crime, or because the restrictions that the civil libertarians have put on the camera usage is debatable. Also, it could just be that the cameras we have aren't great, and are particularly not useful at night, when most of the crimes occur. more ›

Okay, we're kind of scared to say anything about the Your Black Muslim Bakery now, so let's just leave it at the handyman confessed, Chauncey Bailey's source has come out, and the bakery didn't do so well in health inspections last year. Oh, and the handyman was arrested in SF for mugging someone on a MUNI on Halloween 2005, but was spared jail time (see comments for clarification) by the DA's office for lack of evidence. more ›

Campus tree residency news! At Cal, it turns out those people living in the trees to protest the UC's plan to cut them down themselves did significant damage to the trees in question by cutting off the tops of the trees to put in their sleeping platforms. Ah, the sweet smell of irony. Meanwhile, at rival Stanford, they've finally evicted a veteran who's been living in the tree grove off Palm Drive for almost 10 years. (Does anyone actually pay to live at Stanford anymore? Goodness.) more ›

SF shootings: two shot, one dead, in the Bayview Monday afternoon (the resulting scene then blocked the T-Third for an hour), another shooting in Oceanview, and a man shot in a drive-by at 21st and Florida on Friday night. more ›

Authorities are worried that the violent weekend is a harbinger for a bad July 4th. With 12 people dead (two more people were shot after the articles about 10 people killed went up), and half of those killings in Oakland, the Oakland PD is going to be upping patrols this Wednesday. more ›

Well, that was a grim Daily Californian homepage yesterday. The top six stories: pedestrian hit by car on Telegraph; Berkeley summer camp evacuated due to Tahoe fire, body found near the Berkeley Marina, beloved local activist hit by train, Cal student to be tried for killing David Halberstam, and memorials for the local murder-suicide family. On the bright side, the other article on the home page is that Cal basketball star DeVon Hardin has decided not to enter the NBA draft. more ›

Yuck. A SFPD cop was arrested for soliciting a 14-year-old prostitute in Oakland. The cop's a motorcycle squad supervisor and is a 37-year veteran of the force. The 14-year-old said it was her first time on the streets, the cop was apparently cooperative when the Oakland PD caught the two of them in his car, and told the Oakland officers that he thought the girl was 18. more ›

As discussed in the SFist Contributes tips page, what people heard in Ingleside Heights early yesterday morning was a mysterious car explosion. Witnesses saw a man park a car, get out of the car and into someone else's, and then the parked car burst into flames. Around 7:00 a.m, another car mysteriously exploded, this time in the Tenderloin at Ellis and Taylor. The two incidents aren't thought to be related -- but how weird. more ›

A truck filled with 60 cows tipped over in Contra Costa County yesterday. Ha! Despite our most diligent efforts, we are unable to find any pictures from the scene, so we're going with the "Cow Crossing" sign you see to your left. more ›

A man stabbed a 15-year-old girl and the man who tried to stop the attack on her, in a Twin Peaks bakery on Saturday (link fixed per comments). The man, Scott Thomas, had just been released from San Quentin the day before, where he'd been in solitary confinement for attacking a guard. Thomas had been sent to San Quentin for violating the terms of his parole (which he's done 8 times since 2001 -- it looks like he went in originally on a mix of grand and petty theft-type charges). Thomas was caught by two police officers who were in the area, and who described him as covered with blood, carrying a hunting knife, and speaking and singing incoherently. The girl is improving, and the man who intervened suffered only minor injuries. more ›

It's a tough biz, the tourism industry -- the cops had to break up a fight between the Bush Man, the Clown Man, and the Fisherman over who got to work what turf on Fisherman's Wharf last weekend. Doesn't the Bush Man just sneak up on the other guys' turf when they're not looking? more ›

Lotta activity on Capp Street lately: not only was a man caught beating and trying to strangle a woman around 15th and Capp, but a few weeks earlier, the SFFD found a pot farm on fire two blocks down, in the same building as the Space 180/Locus Arts gallery (where Kim-Shree Maufas and Jane Kim had their school board election party.) more ›

A man was stabbed at 11th and Folsom at around 1:30 Monday morning. The victim is alive but suffered life-threatening wounds. more ›

More mysterious criminal events in Fremont! This time, someone dropped a five-foot tall safe off a truck in the middle of the road. The safe had been pried open, revealing...... a collection of about 70 Star Wars action figures, still in their original packaging. Somewhere, a broken-hearted fan weeps. more ›

A woman was arraigned in San Mateo county for throwing produce (apples and asparagus) at a gay couple walking down the street in Pacifica, while yelling slurs from a van driving past them. The police investigating the incident later found the woman, with a piece of asparagus in her purse. more ›

Remember the folks in Atherton whose high-quality wine was stolen from their cellar (about $145K worth)? Turns out it was their maid and her boyfriend. (For many reasons, this crime would never have happened to us, we'd just like to say.) The police set up a sting operation where the owners asked the maid to clean the house, and saw her on a hidden camera run into the cellar (where there was no cleaning to be done) and take some bottles. Later, the boyfriend figured out there was a camera, but not before they got some clear footage of his face. The cops got a warrant and found the missing bottles in the boyfriend's house. The owners are still looking for "a highly prized and difficult to assemble set of Red Bordeaux representing an unbroken line of more than 20 years in harvests," which was stolen in the first heist. Also: there's a wine insurance business now, and the Merc News informs us that "stolen wine is hard to track because bottles do not typically have serial numbers and there is not a central registry of brands." more ›

Mirkadreamy drives a 1970 VW. Ross called the cops, who seemed kind of indifferent about it, and now the Conquistador's upset. You know, it's this kind of thing that makes a man want to fight crime. more ›

So as we were heading to the Opera Plaza movie theater for the SFIAAFF yesterday around 5:45 p.m., we noticed a huge number of helicopters overhead and wondered what was up. Turns out there was a huge fire on Page Street that started around 5:15 p.m.. One person jumped to escape the fire (no word on that person's condition), one firefighter had to jump onto the roof of the adjacent building to escape smoke, and one person's cat is missing. 125 firefighters were called in and put out the fire by 6:30. The investigation team suspects arson. more ›

This would have been even more awesome if it had been on top of a moving train. The police in Berkeley used a hook-and-ladder truck to conduct a manhunt on Telegraph Avenue rooftops after the robbery of a Noah's Bagels at around 6 a.m. Monday morning. After what was described as a tense "building-by-building, rooftop-by-rooftop search," the man was located on top of a building and arrested without further incident. more ›

Last Saturday, a fight broke out at the "Hyphy High School Bash" at the Marin County Corte Madera Recreation Center. The police raced to the scene upon hearing reports of gunshots and a Golden Gate Transit bus being blocked on Tamalpais Drive by 80 teenagers. They couldn't confirm whether shots had been fired, but someone had sprayed pepper spray into the crowd and around the same time, someone broke into a nearby elementary school. Hilariously, the Marin Independent Journal describes hyphy as "a music and dance expression that grew out of the Bay Area hip-hop scene," and one Corte Madera parent says "It's really ironic. We live in Marin, and I feel safer sending my daughter to San Francisco." Ooooh, not dangerous San Francisco! Hyphy hyphy hyphy hyphy (or, as they call it in Marin, "a music and dance expression"). more ›

When we go on vacation, we always worry somewhat paranoiacally that our house has burned down, or that the ants have taken over, or that we left all the major appliances running and the iron and the dishwasher are plotting their coup -- but coming home from a two-week vacation and finding a dead body is not a scenario that had occurred to us! The vacationer mentioned that he did have a catsitter coming in periodically while he was gone, but didn't know if that was the dead person because he didn't check the body. Also, the dead body was naked, in handcuffs, and had a plastic bag over its head. Man, we are never going on another vacation ever again. more ›

Negative portrayals of Asian-Americans and gays aside, we do still love Humphrey Bogart in the Maltese Falcon -- so you know we're avidly following the news that someone has stolen the famous jewel-stuffed bird from the John's Grill restaurant on the edge of the Tenderloin, where Dashiell Hammett used to hang out. There's a $25,000 reward for the bird's return. (We're just giving this story to you straight because, while the Chron's "hard-boiled" writeup of the story is pretty funny, we found it next to impossible to actually glean any actual information from the article as a result.) more ›

Remember the case we told you about last Friday, about the guy who killed someone with a mechanical robot dog? Well, the judge in the case (at left) got hit by a light-rail outside the San Jose federal courthouse yesterday around lunchtime. The judge was taken to the hospital but is reported to be okay enough to keep presiding over the trial. more ›

If you, like us, heard very stressed-out-sounding BART announcements on your commute home today about the Hayward BART station being closed because of a police action and needing to take Richmond trains to get to Fremont last night, that's because four people were shot in the area of the Hayward BART stop around 5:48 p.m. No one is dead, but one person was found injured on a platform and another in a bus zone (we don't know where the third one was). The station was closed and BART trains were allowed to go through but not stop, as the police cordoned off the area. They found one possible suspect in a nearby housing complex and took him into custody. more ›