Man accused of setting fire to San Francisco pharmacy was arrested again weeks after prosecution snafu led to his release

April 14, 2025

The uphill struggle faced by pharmacies trying to stay in business amid endemic street disorder in San Francisco has been illustrated by another remarkable instance of criminality before the city’s courts.

Prosecutors say that Craig Morales wandered into the CVS pharmacy at Fisherman’s Wharf on the morning of Monday February 24 2025 but, instead of making a purchase, he set the drugstore on fire.

“The intensity of the fire and smoke was such,” wrote assistant district attorney Rebecca Warren in a motion to detain, “that the overhead fire suppression system was triggered, dousing the fire with water.”

Investigators later determined that Morales had found empty cardboard boxes stored on a wooden pallet in an aisle of the store, set it ablaze, and then left.

A court was told that, having seen images of Morales captured by the CVS store’s surveillance cameras, “several” officers were able to identify him, and he was arrested the next day near Oracle Park.

Morales arrived in San Francisco having apparently been moved on from San Jose where he was arrested eight times last year, on each occasion being prosecuted not very assiduously and to not much effect.

These were for being under the influence of a controlled substance, trespassing, robbery and theft.

He is perhaps best known for the 2015 arson of an apartment complex in San Jose which displaced six families.

The prospects of Morales being dealt with more robustly by San Francisco authorities receded somewhat after the entire case against him was dismissed by Judge Brian Hill — a visiting judge from Santa Barbara — when the proceedings blew past a 10 day time limit for a preliminary hearing to be held.

Morales was as a consequence ordered released on March 18. Two days later San Francisco prosecutors refiled the case and the defendant was ordered to appear again in court on April 4.

He didn’t appear on April 4 and the court issued an arrest warrant. It appears that the reason he didn’t appear was that, that same day, he was being booked back into jail on a grand theft charge after allegedly stealing a cell phone from an American Medical Response ambulance in San Francisco a day earlier.

Police detained Morales at the ‘homeless navigation center’ on the Embarcadero.

At a hearing on April 9 Superior Court Judge Gerardo Sandoval denied an enterprising attempt by Morales’ attorney to have his client released on his own recognizance. The judge did order ‘pretrial diversion’ staff to assess whether he could be freed with ‘assertive case management’.

In February this year CVS competitor Walgreens closed 12 stores across the city.

This included the store on Market Street in which a robber, Banko Brown, was shot by a security guard in 2023 after Brown threatened to stab and then lunged toward the guard.

San Jose Police Department — presumably cock-a-hoop that Morales is now San Francisco’s problem — refused to provide a photograph of him. They claimed, preposterously, that mugshots are “records of investigation” and as such cannot be disclosed.

San Francisco police will not, as a matter of policy, provide mugshots. They optimistically describe Morales as “no[t] local” in their arrest logs.

Morales has pleaded ‘not guilty’ to arson, possession of incendiary materials and burglary. He will next appear in department 11 at the Hall of Justice for a preliminary hearing on April 21.