BART Senior Police Officer Eric Hofstein found her again on Thanksgiving. She was wandering through Powell Street Station, covered in urine, purple rings under her wandering eyes, hair matted and scalp bald from brain surgery six weeks earlier.
Hofstein met the young woman, who is not being named by The Chronicle because of her mental state, a couple of years ago when he remembers her running into the same station, throwing trash and yelling, “I just want to be safe.” She was the frequent subject of 911 calls for racing naked through the trains, he said.
He got in close contact with her mother, Cinda Romero, a nurse in Southern California who described her daughter as an avid reader and lover of Latin before mental illness derailed her. He obsessed over connecting Romero’s daughter with treatment and housing — but nothing worked.
By the end of 2020, the officer and mother were just trying to save the young woman’s life.
The years-long struggle to rescue a troubled loved one is not unique in San Francisco, where thousands of people, many with mental illness or drug addiction, live on the streets. Hofstein, who represents a new push of BART policing to tackle social problems in the train system, has met dozens patrolling downtown stations for the past six years, trying to help people find help and their loved ones. The father of four understands: He lost touch with his oldest child, who has bipolar disorder, years ago. He and the families he becomes close with know how getting help can be agonizing.
“It’s been exhausting,” Romero said in a phone interview. “Every day I had prayed for her rescue and help and deliverance from this nightmare situation. I finally had to surrender her safety and care to God, because I had tried to intervene and assist but was ultimately helpless to do anything.”
It broke her heart, she said, but the previous December she told Hofstein she had come to peace with the possibility that although she prayed her daughter would be healed on Earth, it might only be in heaven. Hofstein said those words really got to him.
“Hearing a parent say that, especially after all those years of trying to save this girl’s life,” he said, his voice catching with emotion as he sat inside Powell Street Station on a recent Monday.
In the case of Romero’s daughter, she nearly didn’t survive.
Romero said her daughter, the oldest of six children, was a leader growing up, although she did have a dark side. Her mental illness manifested after she left for college, when she began to pathologically lie and develop delusions before dropping out, Romero said.
Around 2010, Romero’s daughter had her first mental break and psychiatric hold compelling her into care at a hospital, her mother said. That began a decade of phone calls from police, doctors, social workers and her daughter rambling from emergency rooms, Romero said. About seven years ago, Romero’s daughter moved to San Francisco, became homeless and started abusing drugs.
Romero’s daughter already had two dozen contacts with BART police that led to holds for self-destructive behavior before Hofstein met her about two years ago. In May 2019, he said he talked her off a restricted elevated walkway area where she was dangling her feet as trains whizzed by. In August, he referred her to social workers through a city-run jail diversion program, but it didn’t stick, he said. In December, he got her prioritized for housing, but she left soon after and lost her spot.
Romero said the calls from her daughter and people trying to help increased to a couple of times a week.
“You really get phone PTSD. ... That phone call could be that they’re in the hospital again, that they’re dead, that they’re in jail,” she said. “It’s always there with you 24/7.”
In October 2020, Romero got a call from Mills-Peninsula Medical Center in Burlingame: Her daughter, then 31, had been diagnosed as gravely disabled and needed surgery for a brain aneurysm. A week later, her daughter left the hospital against medical advice before the staffers could arrange for conservatorship, which is court-mandated mental health treatment, she said. Police brought her back by ambulance the next night, but she ran away while the hospital waited for administration to review her case, Romero said.
A letter from the hospital to Romero on Nov. 25 about that emergency department visit read “clearly we let you and (your daughter) down on this visit.” A spokesperson for Sutter Health, which runs the hospital, said the system wasn’t able to share any details about patient care due to patient privacy laws. Sutter didn’t answer general questions about psychiatric care.
Over the next six weeks, Romero’s daughter cycled in and out of half a dozen emergency rooms, always walking out the door before she could receive treatment. When Hofstein finally found her daughter on Thanksgiving, he didn’t want to arrest her or write a hold forcing her to go to the hospital, which he feared would damage the trust he’d built with her.
Instead, he found her a spot at a voluntary nonemergency psychiatric clinic. The next morning, as Romero’s daughter was getting antsy, he rushed to the city to write a hold. By the time he arrived, she had left.
Hofstein filed a missing person report and pushed out information to his police contacts. He was in Georgia on vacation on Dec. 10 when he got a call in the middle of the night: Another BART officer found Romero’s daughter and drove her to a locked inpatient psychiatric facility, where she was admitted.
“She’s safe and being taken care of after all these years of never knowing whether she was dead or alive,” Romero said. She said Hofstein was the only person who understood her daughter’s needs over the years.
“I think he’s a hero, a saint, a guardian angel, not just to my daughter but to many people’s children. He’s way beyond an officer,” she said. “He just wants to take his job to the fullest limits of what law enforcement could do if it really cared for the person itself, not just for the legal system.”
Hofstein, who is retiring in March, shunned praise.
“There’s satisfaction of forcing the system to do what it should have done years ago saving this girl’s life,” he said. “I can emotionally let go and not be so anxious.”
Hofstein and Romero see many places where they say the system could have worked better, including 24/7 social workers. Romero wants more coordination among hospitals to understand a patient’s psychiatric history, more training for police in mental illness, easier access to shelters and more long-term programs.
“Everyone needs to start caring and just saying we’re not going to let this happen anymore,” Romero said.
Mallory Moench is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mallory.moench@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @mallorymoench
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