Nobody in San Francisco seems to have known much about William Ellis. He was a 66-year-old veteran with no family and no home. He was gruff, earning the nickname “Grumpy Old Man,” and he walked with the help of a cane.

Every weekday for years, he slept on the wooden pews at St. Boniface Church in the Tenderloin, snoozing alongside other homeless people below soaring stained glass windows and huge marble columns. The folks at Project Gubbio who run the church’s “sacred sleep” program, which offers respite to the homeless, didn’t know Ellis’ backstory, but they considered him family nonetheless.

And so when he collapsed at the back of the church just before 9 a.m. on April 6, they reacted like family. They rushed to him. They cradled his head. Three of them whipped out their cell phones to dial 911.

But nobody answered.

“It was ringing and ringing and ringing like I’d called somebody’s house phone,” said Porsha Dixson, a 35-year-old hospitality monitor, who does everything from connect homeless people to services to clean the bathrooms for Project Gubbio and who lives in Hunters Point. “I hung up and called again. Then I tried to use somebody else’s phone to call. It did the same thing.”

Back to Gallery Homeless man’s death highlights staff shortages at SF... 4 1 of 4 Photo: Noah Berger, Special to The Chronicle 2 of 4 Photo: Noah Berger, Special to The Chronicle 3 of 4 Photo: Noah Berger, Special to The Chronicle 4 of 4 Photo: Noah Berger, Special to The Chronicle







Terry Sedik, a 70-year-old volunteer and retired planning director for Daly City, also dialed 911.

“It would ring and ring and ring, and you’d finally give up and you’d dial it again,” said the NoPa resident. “I probably dialed three times.”

Dixson estimates it took two minutes for a dispatcher to answer, and Sedik said it may have been as many as five. Once a dispatcher picked up, an ambulance arrived almost immediately, but the paramedics couldn’t save Ellis’ life. He had suffered cardiac arrest and six days later was taken off life support at San Francisco General Hospital after a fruitless search for next of kin.

The wait for a dispatcher to answer was excruciating, but it’s not unheard of. While the 911 dispatch center has a goal of answering 90 percent of calls within 10 seconds, it only hit that target 74 percent of the time in March.

As The Chronicle detailed earlier this year, more calls are coming into the dispatch center than ever, and there are too few dispatchers to answer them. There are 105 dispatchers on staff, according to Burt Wilson, president of the dispatchers union. A full staff would be 180.

Francis Zamora, spokesman for the city’s Department of Emergency Management, said he wasn’t able to get specific information about the Ellis calls. But he said dispatchers are receiving 1,000 more calls per day than they did five years ago. The department hired 23 dispatchers last year and a new academy class started Monday, he said.

Wilson said too few prospective dispatchers are sticking it out for the grueling, year-long training process.

“It’s being addressed, but it’s taking so long,” Wilson said. “You live in San Francisco? You have kids? How would you feel if your kid was choking and you couldn’t get through?

“It’s going to take somebody important to die,” before the department gets a full staff, Wilson predicted.

Ellis wasn’t important in the City Hall power-broker sense, but he was important to those at Project Gubbio. And they’re glad that if he had to collapse, he collapsed in church with them.

He was a private, quiet guy who usually had his head buried in a book and was often found huddled beside the church’s heater to get warm. Sedik thought he looked like Gabby Hayes, the cowboy sidekick in old Western movies.

“Though he was a curmudgeon, a lot of people loved him,” Sedik said. “Underneath it all, he was a sweet old guy.”

Before paramedics arrived, Tina Christopher, Project Gubbio’s operations manager, tried to give Ellis CPR, though she’d only ever done the procedure in training classes.

“The body wasn’t reacting like the dummies did,” she said with a sigh.

She said the paramedics worked on Ellis for 15 minutes at the church, shocking him with a defibrillator and eventually getting a pulse before taking him to the ambulance.

As the paramedics worked, they didn’t know their boss was observing nearby. Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White showed up, having heard the call on her radio and the familiar address.

“I’m a big fan of Project Gubbio, the way they open their doors is pretty cool,” she said. “I work behind a desk a lot, but I like to get out there and support the troops. It re-energizes me and inspires me.”

Christopher, a 49-year-old mother of four who lives in Oakland, went to visit Ellis at the hospital a few days later. He was unconscious, but she talked to him for a while.

“I told him how we missed him, and I wanted the best for him,” she said. “I teased him about not giving the nurses too much hell.”

Christopher, who attends church every Sunday, arranged for a priest to give Ellis the Roman Catholic last rites before life support was removed. She said she felt “relieved” when she learned he had died. “Because of my faith,” she explained. “What better place than to go home to our Father?”

The Project Gubbio staff will hold a memorial service for Ellis at St. Boniface Church at 1 p.m. Friday. The Rev. Franklin Fong, the church’s pastor, will lead the service.

“His family would do that for him, so of course we would do that for him,” Christopher said.

Laura Slattery, the director of Project Gubbio, said she hopes the way the staff handled Ellis’ collapse and their memorial service for him shows other homeless people that they really do care.

“It’s modeling to the rest of the community that we’ve got their backs,” she said. “They are suffering, but they won’t be suffering alone.”

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

Benefit concerts

Opera on Tap and Symphonia Caritas will perform Mozart’s “La clemenza di Tito” at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday as a fundraiser for Project Gubbio at the nonprofit’s second site, St. John’s Episcopal Church, 1661 15th St., San Francisco. For tickets and for more information about Project Gubbio, visit www.thegubbioproject.org.