Saturday, August 16, 2008

Totenreich 2: Orlando Martin-Camas



The graffiti on the wall of the San Francisco Unified School District headquarters has been cleaned off, and a small, homemade memorial for Orlando Martin-Camas has sprung up.



The 30-year-old Mexican cook was murdered on Monday night by a gang of punks for reasons unknown, and it's shaken up the neighborhood badly.



The de facto community center around here is the corner grocery at Gough and McAllister run by the brothers Sam and George, and they were devastated. "He was one of the nicest people we've ever known. This is horrible."



They were helping Orlando's family collect donations in order to send his body back to his family in Mexico.



If you're in the neighborhood, stop by and drop a dollar in. It's about the least we can do.

2 comments:

Janet Kathleen Tandy said...

I have a dear friend who lives in Hayes Valley; I worry about her safety given the overwhelming number of gang members on the loose in that neighborhood. Where are the the police and the task force on gang violence? Not walking on their feet, for sure.

momo said...

Thank you for giving a name to this person whose story you told earlier. My mother has worked in the restaurant business in SF for decades. So many of the people she worked with are like Orlando: hard-working, trying to send money back home, and passed over by the press and police when they are the victims of violence.