A former fire commissioner was taken to the hospital with serious injuries after he was attacked by a man with a metal pipe in San Francisco Wednesday night, according to friends and police.
Don Carmignani, 53, was attacked at about 7:20 p.m. in the area of Magnolia and Laguna streets in the city's Marina District, friends and police said. A 24-year-old suspect was later arrested.
Carmignani is expected to survive, according to police.
"He has a fractured skull, a broken jaw and he had to have his face stitched up because he got beat up with a metal pipe," Supervisor Catherine Stefani said.
Officers at the scene obtained a description of the suspect and shared it over their radios, police said. Other officers later found the suspect in the area of Laguna and Lombard streets.
The suspect, Garret Doty, was taken into custody without incident and booked into jail on the following charges: assault with a deadly weapon and battery causing serious bodily injury, police said.
"I can tell you we made an arrest and in that case we’re going to give the district attorney the best evidence we can," San Francisco police Chief Bill Scott said. "These types of brutal attacks, these types of brazen attacks, these are the type of things that have people anxious about what’s happening."
News of the attack on Carmignani comes on the heels of the deadly stabbing of tech executive Bob Lee.
District Attorney Brooke Jenkins promised to be what she calls a “true prosecutor” for the city – in the Lee case as well as the Carmignani case.
Get a weekly recap of the latest San Francisco Bay Area housing news. Sign up for NBC Bay Area’s Housing Deconstructed newsletter.
"What I would expect, assuming that the evidence is sufficient, would be to file assault charges with a deadly weapon if that is the case and we do have great bodily injury here which would be a separate allocation," Jenkins said.
