Six people were injured on Sunday afternoon after an SUV crashed into the Napper Tandy’s parklet on 24th Street in the Mission following a high-speed police chase.
All of the victims suffered non-life-threatening injuries, according to the San Francisco Police Department. Two women from the suspect vehicle were arrested, the department said.
District 9 Supervisor Jackie Fielder, who was at the scene, said two of the injured were a mother-daughter pair walking by the Irish sports bar when they were hit.
Around 3:05 p.m., San Francisco police officers “responded to a burglary in progress” at Buckingham Way and Winston Drive, which is near Stonestown Mall, according to the police department.
“The suspects fled the scene in a wanted vehicle, and officers attempted a traffic stop,” the department wrote, and when the suspects “failed to yield,” police gave chase.
Eddie Stiel, a witness, said he saw the SUV pursued by police on Mission Street. It knocked into a traffic light in front of the McDonald’s near the 24th St. BART station, he said, and then sideswiped a car “with an elderly couple inside” before continuing down 24th Street.
Terence Buckner, a Public Works employee who was sweeping outside the Napper Tandy, said he saw four teenagers in the SUV going at 60 mph being chased by three police cars.
The SUV appeared to veer towards the parklet in an attempt to overtake several cars that were lined awaiting the traffic light to turn green, Buckner said. That’s when it crashed into the parklet.
Another witness said that, after the SUV crashed, its occupants fled and were pursued by officers on foot. Police officers arrested the suspects, the department said. Crime-scene investigators were at the scene Sunday evening, examining the wreckage.
The San Francisco Fire Department initially said that two were in critical condition, but the police department later said the injuries were non-life-threatening.
Fielder, for her part, noted the police department’s expanded powers under Proposition E, which passed 54-46 in March last year and, among other things, eased rules around police chases. Under the measure sponsored by then-Mayor London Breed, officers have been given more discretion to initiate chases, and can do so for any felony or “violent” misdemeanor.
Photos from the scene showed a silver SUV had crashed into the parklet outside the Irish sports bar at 3200 24th St., on the corner with South Van Ness Avenue, upending chairs, splintering wood and shattering glass. The vehicle was facing east on 24th Street and sustained heavy damage.
South Van Ness was blocked off between 23rd and 25th street, and 24th Street was closed between Capp Street and South Van Ness at around 5 p.m. At least eight police officers were on scene at the time, and several firefighters were on scene earlier.
The Napper Tandy is a popular Irish sports bar with a bank of TVs that, in all likelihood, was packed on Super Bowl Sunday.
This is not the first police chase to lead to injury and destruction in the neighborhood.
In 2023, Victor Nguyen was killed while waiting for the bus at the Potrero Center, after a stolen city truck pursued by police crashed into the bus stop, killing the 58-year-old and injuring four others. A month later, an SFPD cruiser destroyed the facade of Lucca Ravioli on Valencia Street, narrowly missing a child.
In 2021, a car crashed into the parklet at the Napper Tandy, hitting two people. Several cars have crashed into Mission storefronts more recently, too: On Jan. 19, a Tesla caused minor damage to the Mellow SF plant store on 21st Street; on Jan. 15, a car crashed into the Dovre Club on Valencia Street, causing it to close temporarily; and in November, a truck crashed into the Walgreens on Potrero Avenue, seemingly during a burglary.
This is a developing story and will be updated as more information becomes available.
Terrible legislation that doesn’t help anyone.
Thank you SFPD for getting this career criminal off the streets. Let’s hope she doesn’t get out for decades. From the standard, in addition to this incident:
Taylor Ross, 32, of San Francisco has outstanding warrants from Alameda County for assault with a deadly weapon, the Berkeley Police Department for grand theft, Sacramento County for grand theft, and the San Pablo Police Department for burglary, conspiracy, and carjacking.
In a word, wrong.
Why do car drivers like to keep smashing into buildings like this? We need to make it harder to drive in San Francisco, they are totally out of control.
How many buildings does the average driver crash into? Zero. Sorry bicyclist busybody librarians, your math is as wrong as anything you claim.
Bicycle crashes unfortunately are an unpunished crime meanwhile. CRACK DOWN ON THESE RECKLESS HIPPIES PRETENDING TO HAVE PLACES TO GO, obviously they don’t really at all.
My God, this is hilarious. Here we have an article about a _driver_ crashing into a parklet, after a _police pursuit_, with absolutely no mention of or relevance to bicycles at all, and there’s a very specific group of posters already using it a reason to screech and howl about bicyclists, yet again.
Some of you desperately need a hobby.
^ I can’t wait to read about more run over bicyclists… oh wait, that didn’t happen, they were just playing the victim because THAT’S LITERALLY ALL THEY DO IN LIFE.
Poooor bicycle victims! Oh, so sad.
The teen drivers & their parents are at fault, but SFPD & SF voters bear a lot of responsibility for this obviously foreseeable consequence.
Pray tell what exactly is the responsibility of SF voters here?
What’s foreseeable, that sometimes car accidents happen and sometimes teens fleeing in cars do dumb things? Yeah, that’s foreseeable, great eye.
And let’s not forget the car that drove into the 26th & Guerrero Market in December and the ever memorable police car that drove into the former Lucca’s.
let’s bring up auto accidents from months ago, that seems relevant.
I was walking down Valencia on Sunday afternoon and witnessed 3 heavy SUV police cruisers BOMBING down the center bike lane, easily going 60 mph. If the car in question in this incident was coming from Stonestown, why were the police racing south? I get that they needed to respond to the crash at Van Ness (presumably?), but their driving was crazy dangerous (no sirens or lights), they were not “pursuing” anyone that I could see, and God help the poor cyclists who had to get out of the way. People drive like a$$holes in this town, the police included.
Someone also crashed into 26th and Guerrero market in January! Put pressure on Jackie Fielder and the mayor’s office to stop this before someone gets killed.
The 26th st deli crash wasn’t related to a chase. It was just terrible driving. The deli owner said someone t-boned the car that crashed into the deli. I’m guessing either trying to make a left going north on Guerrero or one of the two cars went through the light.
Just another day in the neighborhood.
The community around 24th is hurting, and it seems like more antisocial people move here every day. Reckless driving, violent crime, theft, and open fent use are increasingly common. Confronting the offenders means violent threats at least, and death in the worst case (like the recent gas station murder).
Prosecute to the fullest extent of the law here. Show us that dangerous crimes have serious consequences.
Maybe it’s the same teens that drove a stolen car off the Sanchez stairs on their own, no police chase in sight!
They actually were being pursued prior to.
I’m no fan of the cops but they are in a tough spot here. Before voters re-enabled cops to chase criminals, we and they watched seemingly helplessly while crooks drove off from crime scenes. Was that better? Criminals knowing if they drove fast the cops couldn’t catch them? Seems like cops in pursuit should be able to radio for another car to intercept someone trying to make a getaway, but who knows?
There is no evidence to show that case closure nor arrests are correlated to lower crime rates. People choose to commit crimes when they don’t have shit to do. Is the threat of getting caught by the police keeping you from committing crimes? No, you aren’t out there committing crimes because you have agreed to our social norms as a society. Antisocial behavior is not about whether you get put in jail or not, it’s about whether you feel accepted into the culture you operate within.
So this reckless SFPD conduct injures six people and exposes the taxpayers to how many millions of dollars in legal judgements in order to protect private property in the form of a SUV?
People have rights whether bicyclists or motorists abuse them, both are true. Get real please.
Are the bike clowns in the room with you right now?
“A witness tells your humble narrator that the wet cement ought to have been better demarcated with barricades — but, also, that a human driver would never, ever have made this mistake.”
Joe, how many human drivers going into buildings it is going to take this year before you write a mea culpa for this laughably inaccurate statement from December?
I realize the original statement was somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but it is also indicative of a deep blindness to the deaths, injuries, and property damage that cars do in the city all the time. You’d never joke like that about any other deadly weapon, drug, or virus that caused an innocent death every nine days in the city.
“Cars” didn’t do this, “A” car fleeing police did this. Your failure to distinguish is fail.
Human drivers don’t routinely drive through crime scenes, block emergency vehicles and other traffic en masse for no other reason than a network glitch, or blame their mistakes on the government for failing to hold them to their unaccountable lies. Well maybe they try that but it certainly doesn’t end so well for them individually as it does for their self-driving corporate douchelords that you seem to need to defend, for whatever reason. ($?)
> block emergency vehicles and other traffic en masse for no other reason than a network glitch
Lot of caveats there!
> for their self-driving corporate douchelords that you seem to need to defend, for whatever reason. ($?)
Do you think you are cool for saying this?
” block emergency vehicles and other traffic en masse for no other reason than a network glitch” is not a caveat, this happened several times. Dozens or more. We can’t even trust the companies to admit when they do happen, because they always say the same lines in PR control. The only reason they caught Cruise running over and dragging a woman nearly to death was because the company lied about it incompetently. Waymo is no better run, it just hides behind Alphabet legal teams. Hide your head in the sand, pedestrians.
I think you’re very cool for taking issue with it absolutely. /s
This caused so much destruction. They should have stopped when pulled over. What were they thinking?
Hope this experience will be a very serious wake up call for them and a learning opportunity for others.
You can tell by the extensive damage to the “light truck” and the parklet that the driver was driving at a very safe and appropriate speed.
Why the heck do we need to allow SFPD to engage in high speed chases? Do they not have radios? This tragedy could have been avoided. Instead, thanks to the Doomers, we’ve got this unsafe Dirty Harry BS. WTF?
The underlying problem is rampant lawlessness, not police. If criminals thought they were likely to be caught and punished, none of this would be happening. Also, if police could use drones and we just had more cameras in public spaces like other cities (eg New York— not exactly a surveillance state), chases like this would not be necessary AND we would catch criminals.
We do use drones, in fact. We have the most cameras per area of any city.
Why are people still blaming cops for a car chase? If the cops let them go, then people would complain cops let the crooks get away. Pick a side.
You don’t have to chase people around for petty theft at high speeds. You can follow from a distance and use technology to follow them to a safer intercept. It’s not as simple as “a side” when you have multiple available tactics, obviously.
The same thing happened there in 2021, but on the South Van Ness side of the business.
That’s crazy. The napper Tandy’s parklet was also crashed into in April 2021.
Campers,
The answer both short and long term for the BART stops is to return Feinstein’s SFPD’s Kobans to the scene and supplement them with speaker’s podiums and small stages for music and the like.
Public Safety is far more important than any of the individual activities happening at these new community spaces operating safely under the 24/7/365 SFPD presence staffed by 3 cops, two on roving Foot Patrol alternating with the officer in the Cop Box.
This works all over the world beautifully which is what Feinstein found a half century or so back and it should be returned.
The Kobans were removed by Willie Brown to get SFPOA’s endorsement.
And, get Wiener to change the law putting DPW in charge of something that is clearly the job of the cops.
Go Niners !!
h,
Charge and convict them of burglary, reckless driving, evading the police, 6 counts of attempted murder.
It’s not attempted murder unless it was their intention. Try harder.
Who would have thought that having a parklet in the street would cause any safety problems? BTW, if there was more reinforcement AND the courts would do their job and lock up these scofflaws for the maximum time, maybe people would think twice before doing the crime.
Second time at this place. Maybe 24th Street is too narrow for a wooden box in the street.
London Breed has blood on her hands
So looking at the vote distribution, the mission was against prop E. Probably because we see the results. Maybe car chases can be limited to the sunset, richmond and northeast corner where they seem to not care.
They totally don’t care. People run stop signs like they aren’t there.
How are we going to have rule of law without ANY enforcement of the basic shit, as the broken window doctrine makes obvious? Stop sign doctrine is 3x as obvious. We have the cops, we have the cameras, nothing happens? Engardio wants to claim future credit despite all this.
This is why it’s a bad idea to prohibit cops from shooting at fleeing vehicles.
Every vehicle fleeing at speed is intentionally causing serious danger to everyone around them. Police should have the power to take any action necessary to make them stop.
After a few reports of fleeing drivers getting shot in the face, maybe people will stop trying this.
Are we seriously going to entertain this? More likely is that after one or two reports of a random passerby taking the bullet instead, that policy will immediately be reversed.