A San Francisco man has been fighting to have a parking ticket forgiven after the SFMTA issued it to him while he was hospitalized for a stabbing that occurred near his home in the Excelsior.

68-year-old Anthony De Guzman told ABC 7 Thursday that his pleas to the city were falling on deaf ears after he explained he was stabbed twice and was critically wounded at the time that an SFMTA employee issued him a ticket for being parked in a street-cleaning zone. He had parked his car in the curbside space around 1 a.m. on December 5, coming home from his job working as a security guard, when he was stabbed twice on his doorstep and robbed by a suspect who had been asking him for directions, and then rushed to SF General.

"I was lucky that I didn't die" De Guzman tells ABC 7. "And then [later], they gave me a ticket. There is no remorse on their end or empathy on their end."

De Guzman attempted to appeal the ticket through the SFMTA's standard process, giving an explanation and providing the police docket number for his case, but the SFMTA replied with a January 22 letter stating that what De Guzman submitted was "insufficient to overcome the validity of the citation."

As the Chronicle reports, De Guzman is home now after a 15-day hospital stay, but he's unable to work again until March.

He ended up paying the $79 ticket, he said, because he didn't want to rack up late fees or worse. But now after his story got so much publicity, Mayor London Breed decided to make the grand gesture of getting the ticket dismissed — retroactively after it was paid? — or at least that's what she said on Twitter this morning. It's not clear if that means the city will refund him the $79 he said he'd already paid.

We checked in this morning and I'm relieved to say that the citation has been dismissed through the appeals process.



We need to improve the transparency of this process moving forward to avoid this kind of confusion and hardship.https://t.co/GwwBGzqiq3 — London Breed (@LondonBreed) January 31, 2020

Of the approximately 64,000 parking tickets that got contested last year, the SFMTA dismissed only 14,000 of them.

Photo: SF Department of Public Works/YouTube