SF Daily Brief for October 18, 2026

Welcome to SF Daily Brief for Sunday, October 18, 2026. Here is today's brief. We begin in Potrero Hill, where a man was shot and killed at the Potrero Hill Terrace and Annex public housing complex. It was the second shooting this year at the project.

The complex is undergoing redevelopment. At Chase Center on Saturday, the Golden State Valkyries beat the Atlanta Dream 68-64 for the first WNBA Finals win in franchise history. Gabby Williams scored 26 points and made all six of her free throws in the final 2:15 as the Valkyries pulled off a Game 1 comeback. In immigrant communities around the Bay Area, highly realistic AI-generated images of fake immigration raids are spreading on private messaging platforms.

Immigrant communities are frightened by the images. The story says they are circulating during what it calls "Operation Safe California. At Crissy Field, House of Air, the trampoline park inside a converted 1921 Army hangar at the Presidio, will close on Feb. 15, 2027, after 16 years in business. The company said it did not renew its lease, which ends in early March.

In Dogpatch, Dennis Herrera will step down as general manager of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission at the end of the year, ending a 25-year city career. He was elected city attorney in 2002 and served until 2021 before former Mayor London Breed appointed him to lead the SFPUC. A video game set in San Francisco's Tenderloin that cast homeless people as zombies to be cleared out has been taken down. City officials and neighborhood residents had criticized the premise.

Joseph Leung, long known as the face of Sing Tao, retired abruptly from the paper, a departure that stunned his large Bay Area following. He now runs a new outlet and has a favorite in the race for the congressional seat Nancy Pelosi is vacating. Ripple, the San Francisco cryptocurrency company, gave $5 million toward the White House ballroom project. The donation lays out the distance between executive chairman Chris Larsen, a generous Democratic donor, and CEO Brad Garlinghouse, who has courted Trump.

In Marin County, Kevin Mannix, a retired San Francisco police sergeant, is accused of killing his wife and daughter and then himself. The Chronicle reported that he had been moved from a background-check unit to a property unit on Sept. 1, weeks earlier. Friends of Ann Mannix, a retired SFPD deputy chief, told the paper the couple was divorcing. A funeral Mass is set for 10 a.m. Oct. 23 at St. Ignatius Church.

Draft federal guidance published Oct. 1 would shift competitive transit grants toward cost efficiency and add bonus payments for projects in areas with high birth and marriage rates. Bay Area transit leaders say the change would put high-cost urban projects at a disadvantage, including BART's Silicon Valley extension and San Francisco's Downtown Rail Extension, known as the Portal. Eight candidates are competing for three San Francisco school board seats. Mission Local asked each of them which of the final enrollment policy options they would have voted for.

In the Inner Richmond, a couple built a Halloween display of skeletons in Valkyries purple at Third Avenue and Clement Street, with pun-filled tributes to players and coach Natalie Nakase. They call it "Boohalla," after the Ballhalla nickname for Chase Center during games. The 49ers face the Commanders on Monday. Washington's pass defense has been poor this season, but The Standard's preview says Kyle Shanahan's offense may have to lean on the run to win.

The North California Chinese Culture and Athletic Federation held its men's and women's basketball finals at Chase Center, the first time in the group's 24 years that it has used an NBA arena. SMG won the women's title and NKC won the men's. In Dogpatch, Revel Pharmaceuticals, a longevity company, said it created a laboratory enzyme called CMLase that reversed signs of aging in a living organism, the first such result achieved in a living organism rather than in cells in a dish. The work, done with Calico Life Sciences and the University of Colorado, was published in July in Nature Communications.

Singapore Airlines flight SQ31 landed back at San Francisco International Airport about nine hours after leaving for Singapore because a passenger became unruly and injured himself, the airline said. The pilots turned the plane around, the Strait Times first reported. That's today's brief. Thank you for listening.

For the full written brief, go to sfdailybrief.com.