Julia Baran was just finishing her late-night waitressing shift at the House of Prime Rib when she heard the news.
San Francisco Supervisor Beya Alcaraz, appointed by Mayor Daniel Lurie, was resigning after just seven days on the job. Baran was floored.
“Wow,” she texted a reporter. “I did that.”
The 26-year-old was behind a series of revelations, aired in the media and to the mayor’s office, about Alcaraz, a 29-year-old former pet shop owner with no political experience appointed by Lurie to represent the Sunset District. The information Baran brought to light probably catalyzed Alcaraz’s resignation, which political experts have called a major embarrassment for Lurie’s administration.
By sharing text messages, emails, photographs and videos with the public, Baran revealed how Alcaraz had sold her a pet store beset by a severe mouse infestation, often failed to pay rent on time and operated at a loss for years. Perhaps most damningly, Baran shared texts in which Alcaraz bragged about skimping on taxes by paying employees under the table and writing off personal expenses like “dinner and drinks” with friends as business expenses – behavior that’s illegal.
Alcaraz defended how she ran the business Thursday evening, saying in a statement to the Chronicle about the newly unearthed text messages, “I don’t owe a dollar in taxes.” But within hours, she had resigned at Lurie’s request.
“This is probably the first self-inflicted failure for the administration,” said David Ho, a progressive political consultant.
Lurie said Thursday morning, “This is not the first time that I have gotten something wrong. It won’t be the last. But what I commit to all of you, and the people of San Francisco, is that I’m going to learn from this.”
Some have questioned Baran’s motives. Even her father had advised her not to go public with what she knew, Baran said. She was scared, she said. But the petite, soft-spoken San Francisco native, who’s battled her own personal demons and a major family tragedy in the past year, said she ultimately decided to do so because “I would want to know the truth.”
“Whatever blowback I get from this, the community should know,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve benefited from this much. But I think if I didn’t speak out, it would eat away at me.”
Alcaraz had sold Baran the Irving Street pet store in May for an agreed-upon $10,000, but the deal soured as Baran discovered dead animals Alcaraz left in the freezer, foot-high mice nests and piles of dead mice, which Baran spent weeks cleaning out. She still hasn’t paid Alcaraz but said she plans to do so.
The mayor’s office didn’t contact Baran before picking Alcaraz as District 4 supervisor.
Baran said she “felt sick” when she learned of Alcaraz’s appointment on Nov. 6 and called the mayor’s office the next day to share what she knew, texting photos and videos of the infestation to the mayor’s public affairs director, Han Zou.
“Is there anything that you would like our office or the Mayor to do?” Zou texted back.
“It should be up to the Mayor and your team to figure out how to remedy the situation of appointing someone like this without doing any proper due diligence,” she responded.
Disappointed by the response, she told everything she knew to a San Francisco Standard reporter, then a Chronicle reporter. The mayor’s office declined to comment on the text exchange, stating it shared Baran’s evidence with “the appropriate people.”
Baran was raised in the Richmond District by a Polish immigrant father and Chinese American mother. She grew up working at her dad’s auto shop, which inspired her to run her own small business.
“I understand that once you pick up a small business, this is your life,” she said.
Her mom was a “badass lady” who worked in finance and real estate, she said, but struggled with schizophrenia. When her parents’ marriage started disintegrating in her teens, she felt she had to fend for herself and her younger brother, both financially and emotionally, not wanting to add to her parents’ stresses.
“That’s when I developed empathy,” she said. She started working at an ophthalmologist’s office as a 15-year-old sophomore at Lowell High School.
Later, as a City College student, she started working as an operations assistant at an executive search firm. Over four years, sitting in on hours of interviews with potential nonprofit executives, she said she learned what it took to be a good leader.
She also saw how many talented people weren’t hired for top jobs, she said. That insight added to her bewilderment when she saw Alcaraz was appointed without anyone from the mayor’s office contacting her.
“It’s such basic hiring practices,” she said.
This wasn’t the first time Baran had to grapple with the consequences of going public with potentially damaging accusations. She accused a man she knew from high school of sexually assaulting her after keeping quiet about it for a year. She’d get panic attacks when he showed up at social events.
Finally, she decided to go public with it, posting a video on social media that named him and making a police report, though he was never charged. The backlash was swift. She said the man’s friends said she was being vindictive. She started carrying a knife everywhere. The pandemic was in full swing, and feeling overwhelmed, she dropped out of UC Berkeley, where she’d transferred.
But speaking publicly about the alleged assault led to dozens of sexual assault survivors reaching out to thank her for speaking up.
“It felt so free to just let people know,” she said. “I think that applies here too. I could have just turned a blind eye, but who knows how much damage she could have done.”
After dropping out from college, Baran continued working, including at an aquarium store and as an executive assistant. Then, last summer, she was staying at her mom’s house in Pacifica with her brother when her mom had a psychotic episode.
It was her brother’s birthday. They got cake. But when her mom got home at 9 p.m. from work as an Uber driver, she showed Baran a handgun she just bought. Baran was angry and argued with her mom before they went to bed. The next morning, Baran headed to the pharmacy to pick up a prescription and left her brother sleeping in bed.
While she was gone, her mother entered the room and shot her brother twice in the arm then walked out. Her brother locked himself in the bedroom and called 911. Police arrived and found Baran’s mom in the driveway in her sport utility vehicle. One officer got close enough to see that her mom was holding a handgun, which she started to point at him, according to the officer’s statement. The officer fired, killing her.
Baran’s uncle called her to tell her that her brother had been shot. She remembered driving as fast as she could home. She saw the street blocked off and a body on the ground, covered by a tarp. She knew it was her mom.
“I can’t think about the what ifs,” she said, like, what if she’d told her brother to lock his bedroom door before leaving? What if the bullets hadn’t just hit her brother’s arm? What if she’d been home? She could have been killed. “I don’t believe in God, but it could have been so much worse.”
The event pushed Baran to start thinking about her future and prioritize her mental health. She knows she could get a much higher-paying corporate job, she said, but she saw how working a high-stress finance job harmed her mom’s mental health.
“I don’t want it to happen to me,” she said.
When she saw that Alcaraz was advertising giving away her childhood pet store for free, she jumped at the opportunity.
The day after Alcaraz resigned, Baran walked through her sunlit pet store, feeding the animals. Baran hand-fed the baby parakeets formula with a syringe. She gave the chinchillas little pellets, which they picked up and nibbled. A yellow cockatiel sat on her shoulder, enjoying cage-free time, and a bearded dragon rested on her chest.
She pointed out spots along the walls where she’d ripped out the festering mice nests. She showed off her well-stocked inventory, purchased from savings and a $10,000 loan from dad.
“I’m tired, and I’m stressed,” she said. She doesn’t know where she’ll move the store when the lease ends in January, nor does she know when she’ll start turning a profit. “But I feel happy I’m doing this.”
This article originally published at How a House of Prime Rib cocktail waitress kicked up a political storm in S.F. City Hall.