AUDIO – WHY WHY WHY? –
Feb. 27, 2025 – Jonathan Martin was face down, his head in his pillow, when Shy Baniani went to shake his roommate awake.
As soon as Baniani’s hand touched Martin’s bare skin, the coldness sent a shock through his fingertips. Without time to process it, he turned over Martin’s limp body, dialed 9-1-1 and began chest compressions.
“How could this have happened?” Baniani remembered thinking to himself. “I tried everything.”
In the 48 hours before his death, Martin’s family and friends, including Baniani, had desperately tried to get the 40-year-old treated for his addiction to drugs and alcohol. Martin visited the emergency room at UCSF’s Parnassus campus twice and went to the intake center of San Francisco’s largest drug treatment provider but was turned away. It was the first time in Martin’s decades-long battle with addiction that he asked for help, but the city’s fragmented behavioral health system failed to deliver the urgent care he needed.
“He’s too inebriated,” Baniani recalled an intake coordinator at HealthRight 360 telling him as he waited in the lobby, hoping for his friend to get admitted into the nonprofit’s detox program.
