At 12:23 p.m. on Nov. 16, a man is seen on surveillance video wearing a white shawl on his head and a brown coat. Cars whiz by as he stands on the I-80 onramp off South Van Ness, uphill from a homeless encampment.
He lights what looks like a cigarette, takes a couple of drags, crouches, then hurls a burning piece of cloth about 10 feet. It lands on top of a tent. Within minutes, the entire encampment is consumed by flames. A woman and man jump out of a nearby tent and flee uphill. “Get out of there!” a woman yells repeatedly.
BOOM! A large explosion, likely from a propane tank, sends burning bits of eucalyptus tree flying everywhere.
For DJ Meisner, manager at an auto repair shop that borders the encampment, a fire mere feet from his business is just another day on the job.
But the November blaze was the last straw for Meisner and his boss, Andrew Gescheidt, who has owned Popular Mechanix for 35 years and is out $30,000 for fire-related repairs in 2024 alone. They say they have clear video evidence of a man starting the November fire, but — partly because of the shop’s unique location on 14th Street — no agency has consistently taken responsibility for the issue.
“It feels like the Wild West,” said Meisner about the city. “I try not to give into the doom spiral narrative. But they are doing nothing to dissuade me of that notion.”
The encampment that borders Popular Mechanix’s fence is located on property owned by the state’s Caltrans agency, which Meisner said has led to confusion and long response times from law enforcement and clean-up crews. Adding to the frustration, records show the man from the surveillance video has been on a years-long merry-go-round in the justice system, cycling between charges, jail time, being released, and being charged again. Some past charges involve arson.
A month after the November blaze, Meisner said, the 29-year-old man, who court documents identify as Laureano Perez Perez, threw urine and rocks at an employee, a customer, and the shop’s cars. He was arrested, and Meisner thought the business would finally escape his wrath.
However, Meisner was stunned to see Perez Perez walking around the neighborhood days later.
He has reached out to law enforcement with photo evidence of Perez Perez hanging around his business — and has been met with silence. As recently as March 10, Meisner alerted his California Highway Patrol Officer contact, Osvaldo Orozco, that Perez Perez was at Popular Mechanix’s fence line, according to text messages reviewed by The Standard.
Meisner received no response.
The incident appears to be a violation of a Dec. 30 criminal protective order imposed on Perez Perez, which prohibits him from being within 10 yards of the business, according to a copy of the record reviewed by The Standard.
Perez Perez’s run-ins with the law have been frequent over the years.
Since 2019, the San Francisco district attorney’s office has charged him in eight cases, including two instances of arson in 2020, in which he pleaded guilty to one count of felony vandalism and was sentenced to 190 days in jail. Last year, Perez Perez was charged with multiple vandalism and drug cases. Records show he did not attend his latest hearing, on March 12, resulting in an outstanding misdemeanor warrant for his arrest.
Public Defender Charlotte Miller, who is representing Perez Perez on his current cases, said there should be a “more robust social safety net to support vulnerable people in our community, like Mr. Perez Perez, so that they don’t end up in the criminal legal system.”
The November fire caught on camera wasn’t the first time an inferno erupted near Popular Mechanix.
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In 2022, Meisner said he was putting out blazes weekly and even installed a ladder he bought from a hunting website to get a better vantage point from the fence line. He placed extinguisher devices on the fence, but they have proved useless and have been swallowed up in fires.
In October, an early morning fire broke out in Popular Mechanix’s backyard, growing into a large blaze that destroyed two of the shop’s cars and scarred surrounding trees. One of the cars exploded because it was full of gasoline. (Surveillance footage does not show a culprit, though a lit object is seen being thrown over the fence.)
Remains of the cars can be found on the property, and melted chunks of metal are lodged in the ground. The fires are accompanied by a constant stream of trash, crack pipes, and needles, Meisner said, which covers the perimeter of the blue fence that borders the shop.
In response to his pleas for help, Meisner said, he has faced an endless cycle of buck-passing. Because Caltrans oversees the land, Meisner requested that the agency clean up the encampment, but he had to wait around a month for crews to respond, he said. Caltrans did not respond to a request for comment.
Meisner isn’t the only one to face the abyss of California’s bureaucratic black holes.
In January, the San Francisco Chronicle highlighted illegally dumped vehicles left to rust along train tracks owned by three entities: Caltrans, Union Pacific, and Alameda County. The Wall Street Journal reported that same month about “a mishmash of government agencies” failing to work with one another to clear flammable brush in Los Angeles.
In the case of the November fire, Meisner provided a copy of the video to CHP and the SFPD. (CHP required Meisner to purchase a flash drive and load the video onto it.) He remains puzzled as to why the video did not result in Perez Perez being kept off the streets.
Encampment fires have snarled major infrastructure in California before: In 2023, a blaze shuttered a section of Los Angeles’ 10 Freeway for more than a week.
CHP representatives said that after reviewing the video evidence submitted by Meisner, the agency completed an affidavit for an arrest warrant for Perez Perez that was submitted to the district attorney’s office in January. The Standard has learned the district attorney this week decided to file arson charges against Perez Perez for the November incident.
The district attorney’s office declined to comment.
In January, after weeks of silence from law enforcement, Meisner and his colleagues grew exasperated. They contacted the district attorney’s office but got no response. (The district attorney confirmed to The Standard that its office did not reply to Meisner but said it had followed up with the business this week.)
Meisner emailed District 9 Supervisor Jackie Fielder, and an aide responded to his Jan. 24 correspondence, suggesting he contact the mayor’s office. Meisner said he sent a message to the mayor but received no reply.
In a statement, Fielder’s chief of staff, Sasha Gaona, wrote, “It’s a basic right for everyone to feel safe in our neighborhoods, and we were disturbed to learn about this ongoing issue. … Like Mr. Meisner, we are also perplexed by this situation and the lack of response.”
The mayor’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Standing in the backyard of his shop, Gescheidt said he is at his wit’s end.
“I feel like I don’t want to become a vigilante, but the universe is saying you have to do it yourself,” he said. “I’m not going to go out and hit him with a wrench, but we’re trying to be more proactive. Bureaucracy is not helping us.”