Police have identified the body of a man found dead earlier this week inside a Castro apartment as 56-year-old Robert Christopher.
Christopher, who had apparently been dead for a week before his body was discovered, is the 26th homicide victim in the city this year. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that Christopher was found dead in what appeared to be a ransacked apartment at 98 Castro on Tuesday night.
Police have not yet disclosed the cause of death, but according to the Chron are treating the case as a homicide.
One TV news reporter immediately took charge, and asked Newsom about the recent turnover in his office. "It's normal," he insisted, that budget director Nani Coloretti and Climate Change Initiative Director Wade Crowfoot, both announced this week they'd be leaving their jobs. "It's just that people are paying more attention," Newsom said.
Then, apparently as counter-example of how some staff members appear to be deserting him, Newsom brought up Paige Barry Arata. "It's pretty ironic," Newsom said. "We're bringing back someone whose been with me for six years." No one asked about why she was leaving her position in Newsom's gubernatorial campaign as a top fundraiser.
They were too eager to know: "What happened with Eric Jaye?"
We decided to look up look up the organization that is trying to reform behavior by a simple pictorial depiction of good behavior vs. bad. Check out the Barrio Libre Web site for yourself here. It seems the campaign started in 2006, with a rash of violence in the Mission. A community group formed focusing on the "broken windows" approach to fighting crime, the Giuliani-esque notion that small acts of defacing the community such as leaving a steamer on the sidewalk can lead to a feeling that anything goes, including gang violence. (Note the physically impossible stance of the defecating man in the photo. Folks who see fit to drop a deuce on the street corner don't usually come equipped with agility that would awe a Beijing acrobat.)
