SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — It was the middle of the afternoon on Sept. 25, a Tuesday, when Officer Philip Welsh heard a priority call come over the radio: attempted suicide in a Chinatown apartment. Welsh has responded to a lot of suicides. It's almost never a good call, mostly just finding bodies and waiting for the medical examiner to show up. He drove his patrol car to an alley off Pacific Avenue and found a group of people milling about and crying. Among them were a toddler and several other children, all 6 years old or younger. That was tough for Welsh. He knew what he was likely to find inside the home, and what that would mean to these kids. His kids have had to grow up without a mother, and Welsh knows how hard that is.
Police Officer Philip Welsh works in Chinatown, near the home where a young woman attempted suicide. Chronicle photo by Brant Ward
No one in the group spoke much English, but they pointed to a door leading to a basement apartment. Welsh walked down the steps into a large room. Fluorescent lights and a linoleum floor. Lots of big tables with green felt on them. Welsh thought it might be a gambling room, but he had no time to look into it. A woman Welsh guessed to be about 80 pointed to a doorway leading to a small bedroom. Inside was a bunk bed and dresser. A fully dressed woman lay in the lower bunk. Somebody's mother; someone's wife. Even as he stepped toward the woman, Welsh could see a tie hanging from a fixture overhead, and a chair lying on its side on the floor. "I tried to wake her, but she was unresponsive," Welsh recalled. "I called for an ambulance to get over here Code 3. "She had no pulse. I couldn't see that she was getting any air." Welsh, 51, is a native San Franciscan who got a degree in economics from UC Berkeley. He worked in the financial industry for a while and had his own moving company before joining the SFPD in 1995.
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