Update: Prosecutors declined to file murder charges against James Warren.
A 32 year-old man was murdered inside a Single Room Occupancy hotel room on Monday morning, according to Police.
Oliver Carter was found dead inside his room at the Royal Hotel at the corner of Valencia and 14th Streets shortly before noon on Monday, an SFPD spokesperson said.
Police have arrested James Warren, 53, on suspicion of murder. Police did not release details about Carter’s cause of death or the relationships with Warren.
A resident in the hotel said that Carter had a guest over when the incident happened.
Carter’s death is the fourth murder inside a Mission SRO this year and the sixth in the District.
There were no SRO murders in the Mission in 2008 or 2009. Police have so far declined to comment about them and community activist cannot explain the sudden rise of murders at SRO’s.
Josh Vining, a community organizer with the Mission SRO Collaborative, told Mission Loc@l last week that there isn’t a simple explanation for the murders but speculated that many residents are so used to violence that they just don’t report it.
“There is such a culture of chaos and of violence,” said Josh Vining, a community organizer with the Mission SRO Collaborative. “It becomes so common that it doesn’t seem out of the ordinary.”
Two of the murders – including Carters death – have occurred at SROs run by the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, while the remaining two occurred at privately owned hotels. Staff there could not immediately be reached for comment.
The city’s homeless shelters usually refer residents to the Tenderloin Clinic’s SROs.
If this were a Patel hotel, the housing rights activists would be having a fit blaming the greedy Patels.