Muni rider beaten unconscious with metal rod in phone robbery
A Muni passenger was beaten unconscious with a metal rod after his phone was snatched from his hand on a bus near 11th and Mission streets in SoMa on the evening of October 27.
Prosecutors say the attacker was a fellow rider, career criminal Stephon Fowler, who tore the iPhone from the man’s grip as the bus made its way through SoMa shortly after 5pm.
When the man tried to get his phone back, Fowler refused to return it, told him he would kill him and turned on him with the rod.
“The defendant repeatedly struck the victim in the head with a metal rod, breaking it into two pieces, and continued striking the victim’s arm with the broken rod,” wrote assistant district attorney Rebecca Warren in a motion to detain.
“The victim fell and lost consciousness, sustained a head laceration requiring a stitch, and suffered swelling and pain to his mouth and arm.”
Warren says Fowler, 58, went on demanding the phone and threatening to kill the victim while making jabbing motions toward his abdomen with the rod, and was still holding the weapon when SFPD officers arrived and arrested him at the scene as the victim was taken to the hospital.
Fowler’s record stretches back to a 2010 criminal threats conviction, and he has since been convicted three times of assault with force likely to cause great bodily injury, in 2016, 2018 and 2021, and twice of second-degree burglary, in 2019 and 2024.
“Given the violent nature of the defendant’s conduct and the injuries the victim sustained because of defendant’s assault and the defendant’s history of violent priors, his release would pose an unacceptable risk to the safety of the victim and to public safety,” Warren wrote.
Fowler, who remains in custody, will next appear on December 8 for further proceedings at San Francisco Hall of Justice. He earlier pleaded not guilty to second-degree robbery, assault with a deadly weapon and criminal threats.
The attack is the latest in a run of violence on the city’s buses this year. In September a man was repeatedly stabbed in the neck, face and chest with a box cutter on a 14 bus after he stepped in to protect two women riders, an attack blamed on Glenn Hopkins, who was free on pretrial release in two separate cases, while in July three women passengers were assaulted in the space of an hour, one left with multiple facial fractures and a broken nose, in attacks prosecutors say capped months of assaults on women riders by Edward McQuillion, whom a judge then released on an ankle monitor.
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