Part 2 of 2: We follow a number of infamous diversion cases, including two recent and notorious cases where offenders assaulted and/or killed innocent people after going through diversion. Read part 1 here.
In San Francisco, you can be declared mentally ill for having a substance abuse disorder, so the bar is set fairly low. While we weren’t able to obtain individual cases from the district attorney’s office, we were able to trace some cases through media reports and the court system.
Troy McAlister
Perhaps the most infamous diversion case is one I have followed closely for over six years, Troy McAlister, who on Dec. 31, 2020, struck and killed two pedestrians, 60-year-old Elizabeth Platt and 27-year-old Hanako Abe. After five years the case was finally moving toward trials when the public defender’s office requested diversion. In a 253-page document that I obtained in 2021, it is clear the system failed McAlister through decades of coddling, including participation in several diversion programs, which clearly didn’t work. Because of the intense international media coverage, the notoriously lenient Judge Michael Begert, who created the city’s diversion courts, denied McAlister’s motion (on Jan. 20, Begert was reassigned to handle felony and misdemeanor trials).
Patrick Thompson
Then there’s Patrick Thompson, the poster case for failed diversion. Thompson had been charged with three separate cases in 2017: misdemeanor contempt of court order, felony assault with a deadly weapon other than a firearm and battery, and felony battery with serious bodily injury. A judge declared him incompetent, and he was transferred to Napa State Hospital for the mentally ill. After his release, he was accepted into mental health diversion, which the San Francisco public defender’s office said he “successfully completed” in August 2020. A court transcript shows that the district attorney’s office under Boudin didn’t object to Thompson’s release, despite the fact he had been arrested five months prior — while still in the diversion program — for threatening a female police officer with an axe. As another officer seized the axe from the sidewalk, Thompson turned to him and said, “If it was up to me, I’d kill everything that stands.” He then disclosed he was “a mental patient.” On May 4, 2021, after he was deemed a “successful” diversion graduate, Thompson randomly stabbed two women, ages 63 and 84, on Market Street multiple times.
Dennis Duree
On Dec. 12, 2025, Jenkins announced that her office secured the conviction of Dennis Duree for attacking two people on Mission Street that left one dead and one injured in December 2023. A closer look at Duree’s history shows his arrest records were sealed for a December 2021 arrest that included eight counts of battery and sexual battery after he agreed to a “mental health plan.” While in diversion in San Francisco, he missed several court appearances because he was in jail on drug charges in San Mateo. Duree still managed to “successfully complete” the program, allowing him to stab a 45-year-old man and a 38-year-old woman, killing the man and leaving the woman gravely injured.
Cassidy Wyatt Allen
Police were dispatched to the 200 block of Granada Avenue in San Francisco’s Ingleside District on Nov. 23, 2025, after a tenant returned to hear someone inside rush to the front door and lock it. Once inside, officers discovered Jessica Alejandra Sanchez Landaverde lying on her back near the foot of her bed in a pool of blood. The 38-year-old had been beaten and strangled, with ligature marks on her neck, and her jaw was so badly damaged that a medical examiner later concluded it had been broken. The evening of the murder, officers responding to a welfare check near 19th Avenue and Sloat Boulevard located a man matching the description of the killer, Cassidy Wyatt Allen, a 45-year-old transient, and subsequently booked him into San Francisco County Jail on suspicion of murder and first-degree burglary.
Not only was Allen a violent, repeat offender, but he had “successfully completed” diversion. In 2023, he entered a Portola District home, where he showered and, wearing only a towel, fell asleep in a child’s bed (the child fortunately was with her mother). The public defender and district attorney negotiated a settlement, and Allen received credit for the 15 days he served in county jail. Over the next two years, Allen was placed on diversion for another crime. In August 2025, Allen struck a number of people with his fist after they refused to give him money. He punched a 79-year-old man, pushed him off his bicycle, and pedaled off on the stolen bike. Allen was arrested and booked for robbery, battery, and elder abuse. At his hearing, Allen received a negative diversion report from his previous crime for failure to attend the program. On Oct. 10, 2025, the public defender and the district attorney agreed to another admission to mental health diversion for Allen. Just 45 days later, Sanchez Landaverde was dead.
Charles Roy Wentworth
Between 2019 and 2024, Madera, Calif., resident Charles Roy Wentworth was arrested in San Francisco nearly a dozen times on charges including possession of ammunition, stealing cars, possession of drugs and paraphernalia, burglary, and threats of violence. He did all this while living in taxpayer-funded “permanent supportive housing,” where he was in diversion via a treatment program at HealthRIGHT 360 for previous crimes. He received a “positive progress report” in June 2022, and in April 2023, Jenkins’s office didn’t contest the public defender’s request to have Wentworth’s charges set aside. In November 2024, Wentworth was arrested again for possession of drugs and paraphernalia. On Dec. 31, 2025, Wentworth was charged with strangling his dog to death in broad daylight.
On Dec. 29 at 11:25 a.m., Wentworth aggressively pulled and choked his pit bull “Smokey” by his leash and collar, lifting the dog off the ground so his front paws were in the air. Witnesses reported that Smokey went limp, collapsed, and became unresponsive. Wentworth then dragged Smokey’s dead body around until officers arrived on the scene. Officers found Smokey with his tongue protruding from his mouth, and witnesses said the dog appeared terrified prior to the incident.
While these cases made the news, in the district attorney’s mental health diversion spreadsheet, there are dozens of horrific cases that did not, from child abuse causing death to gun felons carrying firearms in public to those four attempted murders. There are also numerous possession of narcotics for sale cases in mental health diversion (so if you’re wondering where most of the drug dealers go, it’s definitely not prison), along with felonies such as domestic violence, robbery, burglary, animal cruelty, elder abuse, stalking, assault with caustic chemicals, and “attempted torture.”
How San Francisco stacks up
The Judicial Council of California’s 2025 Mental Health Diversion Data Summary Report reflects data on the number of petitions that were granted for mental health diversion under Penal Code section 1001.36 beginning July 1, 2019 (the start of the data collection period) through December 2024. During that time, 17,152 cases were diverted in California, and 9,130 were felonies. San Francisco reported 13 quarters in which 708 out of 889 diverted cases were felonies. Alameda reported 19 quarters worth of data during which 379 petitions were granted, including 179 felonies. Over 22 reported quarters, San Mateo granted 416 diversion petitions, 155 of which were felonies. Santa Clara County also reported 22 quarters — they granted 1,267 diversions, but just three were felonies.
In a Jan. 9, 2026, article in the San Francisco Chronicle about drug court diversions, Jenkins — when “presented with the data on applications and admissions,” criticized the growth in cases, stating, “This is an abuse of this statute. It’s worse than I even knew.” She blamed Judge Begert as being too lenient (he was). As though she just stepped off the campaign trail, Jenkins told the Chronicle, “Violent crime is being allowed to enter (Drug Court), which was never the case before. Defendants have more serious charges, and they have less serious drug-abuse problems.”
I don’t disagree with Jenkins or her assessment; however, she also bears responsibility for the over-use and misuse of diversion programs, particularly because the California penal code dictates that she must review all diversion programs annually, that no program shall continue without her approval, and that no person shall be diverted unless she has approved it. Jenkins should use her authority to suspend all diversion programs until she has reviewed them, which she hasn’t done since she took office. There is absolutely no excuse for violent and repeat offenders, including drug dealers, to dodge the justice system by going to diversion of any kind.