We're now learning more about the suspect who was at the center of the shelter-in-place emergency and seven-hour standoff at the Crown Hotel on Valencia Street Friday. 57-year-old Samantha Helstrom, a trans ex-Marine who grew up in San Francisco, tells ABC 7 in a jailhouse interview that she's sorry for what happened, some of which she does not remember because she had been drinking, but she still feels that the SFPD's handling of the situation was an overreaction and made little sense. Also, the gun she brandished that started the entire drama turns out to be a replica gun.

"That was not a de-escalation," Helstrom says. "That was an escalation."

She's been charged with two misdemeanor counts of brandishing a replica weapon and was still jailed as of Monday night.

Also we now learn that Helstrom was the subject of a rather sensational 2001 piece in the Chronicle in which a reporter followed her to a Thailand hospital to observe her sex reassignment surgery, from inside the operating room. At the time, Helstrom was 41 and a frequenter of goth clubs in the city, and the piece gets fairly offensive in its squeamishness over Helstrom's trans status and sexual orientation — it's also a bit of an anachronism in Helstrom's own casual use of the word "tranny" and the fact that she's repeatedly mistaken for a gay man and called gay slurs on the streets.

Friday's incident began when a building manager and pest-control worker knocked on the door of Helstrom's room in the SRO where she lives at 528 Valencia Street. She tells ABC 7 that she had been depressed and consumed a significant amount of alcohol, and had fallen asleep while watching a movie. The next thing she remembers is hearing her name being shouted and negotiators were demanding she come out of her room. "I told them, 'I didn't do anything.'"

As NBC Bay Area reports from a similar interview in the behavioral unit at SF County Jail, Helstrom has no memory of pulling the gun on anyone. She does, however, remember stepping into the hallway and being struck by non-lethal rubber bullets, and saying, "Shoot me, shoot me." She clarifies, "It wasn't like 'kill me.' I don't know if I said 'kill me' because they were shooting at me." Also, she tells the station, that she is not suicidal. "I have two kids; I don't want to go anywhere."

The Examiner has delved into the role that the Department of Public Health played in Friday's negotiations with Helstrom, who as of last fall now have a formal agreement, via the mayor, to play a role in handling mental health crises with the police. This is all part of the SFPD's new mandate for de-escalation following a spate of officer-involved shootings with questionably armed, mentally unstable or erratic people.

Already, the SFPD and DPH have identified 100 mentally ill individuals who are the most frequently in need of hospitalization, and in fact there was one individual who was hospitalized via 5150 — the police code for a forced mental health hospitalization — 48 times in one year, or nearly once a week.

But it's unclear where communication broke down over Helstrom's situation — why she was not identified as intoxicated, or how police and the DPH determined that she was a potential threat to them or herself over the course of the seven-hour standoff.

"They could have rushed me, taken me down," Helstrom said to NBC Bay Area. "I think it was an outrageous waste of money."

But ABC 7 notes that Helstrom was already known to police via a 2012 incident at an SRO in North Beach in which she says she accidentally shot at her own hotel room door. At the time police said they found evidence of possible explosives inside the room.

And SFPD spokesperson Officer Robert Rueca tells ABC 7, "We're not going to leave it at chance for anyone or anything that might cause an incident to get worse, especially when you're thinking about the well-being and the safety of the public."

Previously: Armed 60-Year-Old Woman Prompts Shelter-In-Place Drama In The Mission