We’ll probably never know the exact day on which 56-year-old Brian Egg was killed. But Saturday will be the one-year anniversary of the discovery of his mutilated body inside his SoMa home, and the case remains unsolved.
There’s a tragic but poignant detail in ABC 7’s update report on the one-year anniversary of the discovery of Brian Egg’s body after his grisly murder: neighbor Scott Free has taken up the habit of regularly tending to the plants, trees, and sidewalks of Clara Street, just as Egg used to do. So there’s your one uplifting detail in an otherwise deeply horrible story of a good Samaritan who occasionally took in homeless people, but was found decapitated with his hands cut off and his remains shoved into a fishtank — one year ago this Saturday, August 17. The case remains unsolved, despite the appearance of two pretty obvious-seeming suspects.
"I've truly lost hope for justice for Brian and faith in the SFPD,” Free told the Bay Area Reporter last week. (Drag fans may know Free better as alter-ego Pippi Lovestocking.)
This is not just any cold case. Two “persons of interest” stole $5,500 of Egg’s money to buy a BMW, were using his debit card, and essentially crashing at his place the entire time he was being reported missing. Police had previously arrested Robert McCaffrey and Lance Silva, the two men in question, but both have been released after the district attorney withdrew charges.
Despite not knowing when exactly Egg was killed, we know he was last seen in late May or early June last year. That’s around when a BMW was purchased in his name for $5,500 in Newark, and Silva was seen on surveillance video picking up that BMW after it was towed two weeks later. Silva and McCaffrey were seen coming and going from the home while Egg was missing, and neighbors became extremely suspicious in early August when cleaning crews showed up to do a heavy-duty bleaching of the house. Egg’s family filed a missing-person report, and police said no one ever answered the door at the house.
Silva and McCaffrey were arrested on August 16, a year ago tomorrow, for homicide, identity theft, and elder abuse. Egg’s remains were discovered the next day. But the district attorney dropped the charges on insufficient evidence, and McCaffrey was let go. Silva was jailed in Santa Rosa over a parole violation, but he too was released in late April.
The Bay Area Reporter has the additional interesting detail that Senator Kamala Harris owns a condo on Clara Street, and occasionally shows up with a Secret Service detail. This has done nothing to stem a reported rash of homeless people trying to break into Egg’s still-unoccupied house.
