Man Charged With Hate Crime in Violent Attack in SF’s Marina District

A man accused of taking part in a violent antisemitic attack in San Francisco’s Marina District is being charged with a hate crime, the district attorney’s office said Tuesday.

Juan Diaz-Rivas, 36, is being charged with two counts of assault in connection with the attack, including allegations that he intended to inflict great bodily harm on the victim and that the assault is a hate crime. He pleaded not guilty.

The primary victim was not named in the DA’s statement, but was identified as a 27-year-old non-Jewish man, according to the victim’s friend, who spoke to The Jewish News of Northern California.

According to court documents, an unidentified man was sitting with a friend on the curb near 3100 Fillmore St. around 2:20 a.m. June 13, when a group of six people near them reportedly started shouting, “F— Jews, free Palestine.”

One of the people on the sidewalk, a friend of the victim, told the man that she was Jewish and asked him to stop, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

As the victim’s friend tried to pull him away, the situation escalated into an unprovoked assault, police said. One of the men punched the victim, repeating the anti-Jewish remarks and laughing, the friend told the San Francisco Chronicle. During the attack, the victim fell to the ground, hit his head and lost consciousness, prosecutors said.

Diaz-Rivas and others in the group allegedly continued to punch and kick the victim while he was down.

The men also pushed to the ground and kicked an employee from the nearby Balboa Cafe who tried to intervene, the victim’s friend said, adding that the attack lasted about 30 seconds.

Judge Harry L. Jacobs granted prosecutors’ request to keep Diaz-Rivas, a Sonoma County resident, in custody pending trial because of “a substantial risk of harm to the public, or at least that group,” he said.

The attack comes as Jewish community members say the country is currently experiencing the worst surge of antisemitic hate in decades.

Two weeks ago in Boulder, Colorado, a man hurled Molotov cocktails into a crowd of marchers who were calling for the release of Israeli hostages. Less than two weeks earlier, a young couple was shot to death while leaving an event at the Jewish Museum in Washington. And after last week’s anti-ICE protests in San Francisco, Manny’s — a cafe, bar and event space in the city’s Mission neighborhood — was vandalized with graffiti and smashed windows.

“The Jewish community that I speak to here in the Bay Area is terrified,” said Teresa Drenick, deputy director of the American Jewish Committee. “We are seeing the vandalism. We are seeing hate speech. We’re seeing the assaults that are taking place across the country and here at home — looking at the FBI data — reading what is happening in the news, and it culminates into this sense of our community being targeted.”

Antisemitic hate crimes more than doubled between 2021 and 2023, according to the FBI.