The man ambled into St. Boniface Catholic Church in the Tenderloin one morning last month, sat in the front pew, hunched over deeply, rocked in his seat and began turning blue.

Roy Butler remembers the morning of Feb. 4 with the vividness of witnessing any horrific scene. He’s the site coordinator for the Gubbio Project, the nonprofit that oversees homeless people sleeping in the church’s pews each weekday, and he knew immediately the man was overdosing on opioids.

Butler administered a dose of Narcan into the man’s nose, but it didn’t revive him. The man’s hands were ice cold.

“He was turning blue. His lips were turning dark black,” Butler recalled earlier this week, sitting in that same front pew under soaring stained glass windows.

Butler called 911, and the dispatcher told him to administer another dose of Narcan. Still nothing.

“He was past the point to bring him back,” Butler said, shaking his head. “It happened right here. The man died right here.”

His was one more life lost in San Francisco’s deadly drug crisis. In 2019, 290 people met the same fate — dying in San Francisco of fentanyl, heroin or a combination of the two — more than twice as many as the previous year.

Often, they die in back alleys or SRO hotel rooms, and we never hear any details about them. City Hall doesn’t issue press releases for drug deaths as it does for homicides or traffic fatalities, instead giving overdose information annually in one big data dump long after the victims are dead and buried.

No names. No details. Nothing about the families they left behind.

Supervisor Matt Haney is backing legislation requiring the medical examiner’s office to release overdose data every four months, but it’s still in committee. The Department of Public Health has said it will begin releasing the information every six months instead of once a year.

But still, the information will be slow in coming and short on details. That makes it easy to not give those who die of drug overdoses much thought.

But each statistic represents a real person, and the next overdose tally will include Brian Martin. He’s the man who was pronounced dead at 9:50 a.m. on Feb. 4 — right there in that front pew. He turned 50 in December. He has a daughter and two grandchildren, the second born a week before he died. He loved music, especially the Grateful Dead.

Teresa Mitchell, his older sister by nine years, said Martin was an altar boy at a Franciscan Roman Catholic church growing up in Virginia Beach, Va., and she thinks he chose to die not on a hard sidewalk, but in another Roman Catholic church with Franciscan friars.

“That blew my mind and made me feel like I think he knew,” she said. “When I found that out, it made me feel so good.”

The two grew up with an older sister, a mother who worked as a nurse and a father who spent his career in the Navy. Mitchell wasn’t particularly close with her “little punky brother,” but said he was a sweet guy and had a lot of friends.

When he was 15, he fell down a flight of stairs and badly injured his back. The family thinks the painkillers prescribed to Martin were the beginning of his 35-year struggle with drugs, one that included pills, heroin and fentanyl, Mitchell said. There were many tries at rehab, but they never stuck.

Martin got his high school diploma but didn’t go to college, instead traveling the country following his favorite bands, including the Grateful Dead and Phish. He had lots of girlfriends, and one relationship produced a daughter, but they weren’t very close.

Martin bounced back and forth between San Francisco, when he was feeling the strong pull of cheap, readily available drugs, and Virginia, when he was feeling committed to health and family, his sister said. But in the end, San Francisco won out.

“He’s had a love-hate relationship with that city for 20 or more years,” Mitchell said. “He would tell me stories about how easy it was, but then how scary it was, too, because of all the fake stuff and the fentanyl.”

She last saw him just before Christmas when he told her he was heading west yet again. She argued with him, but he insisted. He called her in January and admitted she’d been right.

“He said, ‘I can’t stay here anymore. If I stay here, I’m going to die,’” she recalled, adding she wired him money for a plane ticket but then heard nothing.

Until Feb. 4. She got a text from her niece, Martin’s daughter. It read, “Why would the San Francisco medical examiner be contacting me?”

Mitchell knew why.

She soon learned the circumstances behind her brother’s death — that it occurred in a church and that he died surrounded by grace.

The Gubbio Project’s mission is to provide “sacred sleep” for homeless people who struggle to get a good night’s rest in the loud, frightening city. This time, the staff provided a sacred death.

“Even in his death, he was provided the dignity and respect that he wouldn’t have out there,” Butler said, nodding toward the church door. “Out there, they’re treated like animals.”

Tara Evans, a chaplain who volunteers at the Gubbio Project, held Martin as he died and prayed for him. Paramedics and police arrived. After a couple of hours, Martin’s body was removed. The whole time, scores of homeless people resting in the pews around him calmly looked on.

“It was remarkable how quiet people stayed throughout the whole thing,” said Shannon Eizenga, executive director of the Gubbio Project. “There was this atmosphere of reverence. I just really got this sense from everyone that we would treat this gentleman in his last moments with dignity.”

The nonprofit set up an altar in the front pew and wouldn’t let anybody sit or lie there for a week. It held a memorial service for him attended by staff and volunteers and a few of Martin’s friends. They FaceTimed with his daughter so she could say a few words. Somebody read lyrics from the Grateful Dead.

A blind woman who volunteers at the Gubbio Project a couple of times a month attended the service and sang “Amazing Grace.”

This is the best of San Francisco, a city that prides itself on its compassion but doesn’t always show it. This column featured the struggling Gubbio Project in December, and readers donated an astounding $200,000 in response — plus piles of hats and blankets. Let’s help some more. Now, the nonprofit needs socks, toothpaste and toothbrushes. And money is always welcome. Learn how to donate at www.thegubbioproject.org.

The medical examiner hasn’t determined exactly which drug killed Martin, but Butler and Mitchell believe the speed of the overdose points to fentanyl.

Martin will be cremated, and his daughter plans to fly to San Francisco to scatter her father’s ashes in the city he just couldn’t shake.

Mitchell knew in her gut this would be the way her brother’s life ended, but it’s still hard — especially since there was no good reason for it.

“He was a sweet kid, he really was,” she said. “He just made some really stupid mistakes. He wasn’t from a battered, abusive home. It was just these drugs.”

“They just grab you and never let go,” she said. “They never let go.”

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Heather Knight appears Sundays and Tuesdays. Email: hknight@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @hknightsf