Deanna Hodgin vividly remembers the first time she saw him. She was eating hamburgers with her husband and their daughter, Claire, just 12 at the time, in a window seat at Kezar Bar & Restaurant.

Suddenly, a man’s face appeared in the plate glass window, his eyes trained on Claire.

“He was snarling and angry,” Hodgin recalled of that encounter six years ago. “Then he started masturbating.”

Right there on the sidewalk in the middle of Cole Valley, the tony neighborhood with a fancy cheese shop, charming cafes and multimillion-dollar houses.

Hodgin called 911, and a dispatcher told her to call the police nonemergency number instead. It went to voice mail, and nobody called back. The family changed tables and tried to put the ugly incident out of its mind.

Claire, now 18, still remembers that day.

“It was just creepy,” she said. “It was just weird.”

And she remembers another time when the same man jabbed a broken umbrella at her and her mom and threw garbage at them, forcing them off the sidewalk into traffic. And she remembers being on the lookout when jogging, crossing the street a few times to avoid him.

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By the time I heard about the man, whose name is Max, several weeks ago, complaints about him had piled up for years. The encounters were all a little different, but boiled down to the same general theme. A clearly mentally ill man was tormenting neighbors, mostly women and girls. Police had known about him for years. And had done very little.

Park Station police Capt. Una Bailey declined an in-person interview with me but emailed a statement on Sept. 12 saying she couldn’t discuss any individual’s health conditions or previous contacts with police.

“We remain attentive to community concerns regarding this individual,” she wrote.

Bailey said the Police Department’s psychiatric liaison and Department of Public Health clinicians had been notified about him.

The Cole Valley neighbors’ complaints are very much in keeping with the concerns of San Franciscans citywide who know that any walk around town or trip on Muni could involve a scary encounter with a person who’s mentally ill and untreated, with city officials tossing up their hands.

With strict laws governing the conservation of mentally ill people, the usual routine has those who are violent or threatening cycle in and out of jail or in and out of hospitals with little opportunity for real improvement. And plenty of opportunity for frightening innocent people.

State Sen. Scott Wiener’s bill to expand the definition of who can be conserved to include the drug-addicted has passed the Legislature and is on Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk, though it’s not clear it would apply in this case.

Hodgin said Max has become Cole Valley’s Boo Radley, the neighborhood recluse in “To Kill a Mockingbird” who neighbors spin stories about because so few facts about him are known. Police say Max has no fixed address, but public records show he at one point lived in an apartment on Frederick Street in Cole Valley, and neighbors say they still see him coming and going from there.

He is usually dressed fairly nicely and doesn’t appear homeless. He is 36 years old. He has shaggy gray hair and burn marks on his face. He comes from Oregon. The Chronicle is withholding his last name because of his mental illness and because he hasn’t been charged — or even arrested — in the vast majority of the Cole Valley incidents.

“I feel bad for him, actually, I feel like he needs help,” said one woman who had a frightening encounter with Max on the N-Judah streetcar a few months ago and declined to be identified. “But I feel like the neighborhood needs help, too.”

The woman said she was riding the train when Max struck her on the back of the head. She called police, who investigated but declined to pursue the case because, basically, she doesn’t have eyes in the back of her head and didn’t actually see the violence. And, officials added, it could have been an accident.

“Even dogs know when they’re being kicked or when they’re being stumbled over by accident,” the woman told me.

Another woman who also declined to be identified said she had two bad encounters with Max on the N-Judah, with him following her, pressing himself against her and calling her a whore. She said the second time, she jumped off the train, rushed to a local business and called police.

As she told it, officers took a report but said nothing more could be done because there was no evidence of intimidation or assault. She asked if she could legally use pepper spray on him next time, and they said then she’d be the one facing assault charges.

Like many Cole Valley neighbors, Barbara Deuel remembers her first encounter with Max. It was a couple of years ago, and she was walking in the Inner Sunset with her son, then 13. She said Max approached them, got within a couple inches of them, refused to move and “screamed in our faces.”

They got away and watched as he grabbed a young woman’s arm and then harassed a young couple with a toddler. Deuel said she called police, who responded promptly. She watched Max walk into Golden Gate Park, but the police didn’t track him.

“They said they were going to go follow up on it, but I felt like they weren’t,” she said. “It shouldn’t be easy to have people committed, but I think it shouldn’t be this hard.”

Occasionally, his victims are men.

John Dorning, a resident of the Haight, said he was on a Muni train the evening of Sept. 12 when Max started pushing people, flailing around and then punched Dorning repeatedly.

He kept muttering, “Who’s the president? Who’s the president?” which Dorning thought was an echo of officials asking him that question in the past to test his mental acuity. A couple of men pushed Max off the train onto the platform at the next stop, Dorning said. He didn’t call police.

And the stories go on and on, traded regularly on Nextdoor and a neighborhood Facebook group. And yet, nothing got done.

Until Sept. 14. That day, police issued an arrest warrant for Max in connection with an Aug. 13 incident in which he allegedly hovered over a woman on the N-Judah near Stanyan and Carl streets and threatened to kill her. Police arrested him the next morning in the Mission.

He was arraigned Tuesday on a felony charge of making criminal threats and another felony charge of false imprisonment.

He was released on $40,000 bail and the conditions he enter the Assertive Case Management program, run by the San Francisco Pretrial Diversion Project with the goal of providing mental health treatment instead of jail time. He must also stay off the N-Judah and nearby bus lines and stay away from the woman he allegedly threatened.

He was assigned a public defender, who declined to comment for this column. He is due in court Friday.

Deanna Hodgin and I met up in Cole Valley shortly after Max’s arraignment. Like every time she leaves her house, she had checked the neighborhood Facebook group to ensure there were no reports of Max out on the streets acting erratically.

She’s pretty sure the reason police arrested him is that The Chronicle started asking questions. After all, there was more than a monthlong gap between his threats on the N-Judah and the arrest warrant.

“I think they know you’re writing about it,” she said. “I think that’s it, and they don’t want to be embarrassed.”

What’s embarrassing is a city that leaves mentally ill people untreated and women and girls to fend for themselves.

The long-sought action may have also been prompted by Supervisor Vallie Brown’s office starting to hear from a lot of concerned residents and relaying their worries to police. Brown said she’s told her constituents to file police reports about any frightening encounter with Max or anybody else. It doesn’t have to be immediate, but it helps police build a case.

She said it’s obvious that leaving people like Max on the streets untreated isn’t working for anybody, including the mentally ill themselves. While state law regarding conservatorships is lacking, police still have the power to arrest people, and the courts can connect them to services. That’s the idea — finally — for Max.

“He needs to be off the streets and be taken care of,” she said. “He has a mental illness, and he needs help. I can’t have people on the streets like that going for children and women. Just no.”

At least somebody in power finally sees it that way.

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