It was a sunny Friday afternoon, and the grass at Dolores Park beckoned. A 27-year-old woman named Cassidy lay down near the tennis courts, popped in earbuds to listen to music and began to doze off.
Suddenly, she felt somebody’s breath on her face. She opened her eyes to find a stranger pressing his body against her side, his arm around her. His eyes were bloodshot, she said, and the veins in his arm bulged. His fingers on her body had the letters E-V-I-L inked on them.
“I think I just found the love of my life,” the man said.
“Who the f— are you? Get off of me right now!” Cassidy remembers yelling in a panic at about 2 p.m. on July 8. She jumped up, and the stranger followed her to her car before she managed to get inside and drive away.
Cassidy, who asked to be identified only by her first name because she fears for her safety, is the latest of numerous women to describe being harassed, touched, assaulted, followed or leered at in San Francisco by a man they believe to be 33-year-old Bill Gene Hobbs.
In what has become a five-alarm fire for many women in the city — spread on social media — several alleged victims have posted photos of the distinctive-looking Hobbs, a 6-foot-4 white man with a buzz cut and a body covered in tattoos, including the E-V-I-L tag on his fingers.
The fact that a San Francisco Superior Court judge dismissed a case against Hobbs in which he was accused of following and grabbing a 15-year-old girl — first reported in this column — is well known by now. So is the fact that he’s back on the streets despite a long arrest record in four counties, despite admitting to me in a phone interview that he follows women he finds attractive, and despite the flood of new complaints.
Cassidy said she knows seven other women who claim to be victims of Hobbs and that they’re buying Mace, pepper spray and even stun guns because they feel so unsafe walking around in San Francisco.
“I’m pretty pissed that they know as much as they know, and he’s still allowed to walk the streets,” she said of city officials. “Where is the line?”
Meanwhile, young women around San Francisco have created their own community of watchers, crowdsourcing sightings of Hobbs and circulating his photos as a warning.
So there is a big, creepy stalker in San Francisco menacing women and the SFPD isn’t doing shit about it and the San Francisco district attorney isn’t charging him or doing anything to stop him.
These women need something to give them an advantage over a six-foot four-inch man, and pepper spray isn’t enough.
In a civilized society this women would be able to be adequately armed.
In the feces covered streets of the Bay Area dystopia, they are at the mercy of a creeper.
And I GARONTEE! when one of these gals pepper spray him they will get arrested and charged with assult…. “Come to california where we still have freedom”…. We the People should ship ALL our criminals there..