On May 24, 2026, at 8:30 a.m., a 93-year-old woman was walking her little dog, Princess, on Cayuga Avenue in San Francisco’s Mission Terrace neighborhood when she felt something hit her incredibly hard on the back of the head. Her fall was broken by a parked car, but when she looked up, she saw a large Black man walking away. The woman’s daughter, Janet Avila, says had her mother not fallen on the car, her head would have hit the concrete pavement. “A neighbor called 911 and an ambulance took her to San Francisco General Hospital,” Avila says. “She has a fractured clavicle, stitches on her knee, and a bump on her head. If that car didn’t break her fall, it would have been much worse.”
Avila, who works for the City and County of San Francisco’s behavioral health department, thought it was a random attack, and that she may never know who harmed her elderly mother. Then one day Avila’s cousin was watching her mom and saw a man walking by who fit the description both her mother and a neighbor had described. Avila’s cousin took a video and sent it to the neighbor, who confirmed it was the same man. Another neighbor also recognized the man as someone who lived nearby at 252 Tingley Street. Avila sent the video and the address to the police sergeant on the case. “He said, ‘O.K., but we can’t go in the house. If you see him on the street, call us.’ So, I waited three hours in my car until he came out of the house. I called 911, gave them the case number, and said I was following him. The dispatcher told me to put my emergency flashers on, and the police came and picked him up.”
On May 28, the attacker, 32-year-old Zavein Blue Wright, was arrested and charged with battery with serious bodily injury, elder abuse, and grand theft. Avila’s mother received a subpoena in the mail for a court hearing on June 10, but when Avila called her mother’s victim advocate, Clara Nowinski, at the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office, she was told there was no need for her mother to come to court because they would be “determining Wright’s competency.” Avila found all of this unsettling. “Is he going to be released near my mom again?” she asked rhetorically. “I know he’s not going to do hard time. I work in mental health here and this is never going to change.”
When she searched the Internet for the unusual name of her mother’s attacker, Avila was even more alarmed. “Your article in the Voice of San Francisco came up, and I couldn’t believe what I read.”
Wright out on mental health diversion for another elder attack
On Oct. 5, 2023, at approximately 7:45 a.m., 80-year-old Ken Majer was walking his little dog, Daisy, at the corner of Baker and Bay streets across from the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco’s Marina District when he was confronted by a large black male. Ken, who is the husband of my longtime editor for the Marina Times and now for The Voice of San Francisco, Lynette Majer, told me that he didn’t know the person and only saw his face briefly before the man forcefully knocked him to the ground and his head hit the sidewalk. Officers from the San Francisco Police Department and an ambulance soon arrived, and Ken was taken to the emergency room at Saint Francis Hospital. He received a CAT scan to determine his injuries, and he required 17 staples to close the wound in his head.
The San Francisco District Attorney’s Office filed charges against Wright of elder abuse, battery with serious injury, criminal threats, and assault with bodily injury. At an arraignment held Nov. 6, 2023, Wright pleaded not guilty to three of the counts. The fourth count, criminal threats, was dropped. Wright was ordered held without bail at County Jail No. 3 in San Bruno. At a court appearance in December, there was a plea of mental incompetency.
On June 26, 2024, I attended a hearing for Wright at 850 Bryant in Department 15, which is San Francisco’s Behavioral Health Court. According to their website, the Court’s mission is to “enhance public safety and reduce recidivism of criminal defendants who suffer from serious mental illness by connecting these defendants with community treatment services, and to find appropriate dispositions to the criminal charges by considering the defendant’s mental illness and the seriousness of the offense.” The presiding judge, Charles Crompton, is known among critics for his leniency. Like the majority of defendants in Behavioral Health Court, Wright’s appearance was waived. After a brief conversation and a glance at a May 2024 report, Wright was judged incompetent to stand trial. The public defender wanted him released. The district attorney did not. The judge pointed out that he was admitted to the Department of State Hospitals on April 4, 2024. “He is already placed and he’s doing fine where he is,” Crompton said, and closed the file. “Next case …”
In January 2025, Oscar Gonzalez, a victim advocate for elder abuse in the Victim Services Division of the District Attorney’s Office, updated Ken on the latest decision by Judge Crompton, and it wasn’t good news: “There is no disposition in this case, rather a Mental Health Ruling. Criminal proceedings have been suspended, not terminated,” Gonzalez wrote in an email. “As for the residential treatment program, I will continue to monitor the case. Next court date is scheduled for 2/19/25 for status of placement. I will update you after the hearing.”
Judge Harry Jacobs was sitting in for Crompton at the Feb. 19 hearing. Wright was in the courtroom and Ken appeared on Zoom. When asked if he wanted to make a statement, Ken pointed to Wright’s long, violent record, making him a clear danger to the community. 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.”
Ticking time bomb with a long, violent history
Public records list an address for Wright in Bakersfield, Calif., from Oct. 6, 2020, to Jan 31, 2024, but he was a fixture in the Marina for most of that time, where he was well known by residents for his erratic and threatening behavior and for following young females. One person described seeing Wright trap two young girls in the doorway of a building, refusing to let them go until she shouted at him and called police. Between 2019 and 2023, Wright was arrested in San Francisco 11 times for crimes including kidnapping, peeking and prowling while loitering on private property, attempted burglary, grand theft, vandalism over $5,000, assault, trespassing, contempt of court, disorderly conduct, false imprisonment by violence, unauthorized entry of a dwelling, and threats of violence. Wright was also arrested for assault with any means of force likely to produce great bodily injury on May 23, 2018, in Marin County, and four times for that same offense in San Francisco on Oct. 14, 2020, Nov. 8, 2020, Oct. 23, 2022, and Aug. 9, 2023. He was also arrested four times in San Francisco for false imprisonment by violence, on Oct. 14, 2020, Nov. 8, 2020, Sept. 9, 2020, and Oct. 23, 2022.
When I informed Lynette that Ken’s attacker had assaulted another elder in a nearly identical manner, she was shocked. She also said the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office had not notified Ken about the latest case. Ken remains fearful of Wright, a ticking time bomb who clearly has more rights than the people he has injured both physically and psychologically.
When I asked Avila how her mother was doing, she said she is healing physically but she hasn’t come out of the house. “The PTSD is my worry — walking is her thing and she walks two to three hours a day. I fear she won’t do that again. It takes away her independence, and she is fiercely independent. When I first started taking Princess on her walks, she was barking when we went by the area, which I’ve never seen her do, so she’s traumatized as well.”
Wright is being held in San Francisco County Jail 3. No bail has been set at this time.
