[BOT] An SF police officer carried a dark secret. Then he got desperate

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Everyone thinks they know what drug addiction looks like in San Francisco: people smoking fentanyl in plain sight, bodies slumped over and sprawled out on sidewalks. But addiction also lives behind closed doors, inside homes and businesses -- even in police stations.

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Cole, 59, had seen addiction up close during his nearly three decades as a city cop. He'd spent more than 15 years as a K-9 officer before helping to launch and supervise a citywide homeless outreach team, the Healthy Streets Operations Center, in 2018.

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In that role, he earned a reputation as San Francisco's go-to officer on homelessness, representing the department in the community and at City Hall. When the Chronicle documented 24 hours of the homelessness crisis in San Francisco in 2019, the police department allowed a reporter to ride along with Cole as he tried to get people off the streets.

"I push my officers to get to know their backstory. If it's a substance issue, I want them to say, 'Let's work on that,'" Cole said at the time. "With substance abuse, you never know when someone is ready to go. One day they're going to say, 'Yes.'"

Former SFPD Sgt. Davin Cole had seen addiction up close during his nearly three decades as a city cop, earning a reputation as the department's go-to officer on homelessness.Photos by Lea Suzuki/The ChronicleFormer SFPD Sgt. Davin Cole had seen addiction up close during his nearly three decades as a city cop, earning a reputation as the department's go-to officer on homelessness.Photos by Lea Suzuki/The Chronicle

Cole spent many days walking some of the city's toughest streets, trying to persuade people to get sober. Then at night, he would retreat to his bedroom, high on painkillers and drinking vodka from the bottle, nursing guilt and shame.

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Rafael Mandelman, a city supervisor who regularly worked with Cole during those years, was among those who had no idea Cole was in the grips of addiction.

"There is this irony in him struggling with this very problem at night that we were trying to figure out during the day," Mandelman said. "It is destroying lives that you can see -- that are evident and visible -- and lives that you don't see."

Cole wondered why he couldn't help himself when he was good at helping others. He knew that, unlike the people he met on the street, he had an employer that would whisk him off to a detox center if he ever asked for it.

"I felt kind of like a hypocrite," Cole recalled. "I was going to bed drunk every night and in tears because I was just so depressed and confused."

Cole's first encounter with the police came at an early age.

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He was raised in San Francisco by a single mother he describes as a "pot-smoking, drug-dealing hippie" who sold marijuana by the pound. When Cole was 6, SFPD officers raided his home and arrested her.

Cole felt he had to grow up quickly to help his mom. While she worked nights as a technician at a local television station, he would come home from school and make himself dinner, alone.

Cole, left, at his graduation from the police academy with then-Sheriff Mike Hennessy in 1992.Courtesy of Davin Cole

Cole's father, meanwhile, was a wanderer who rarely showed up in his life. He died of a heart attack, while homeless, when Cole was 20, leaving behind a notebook full of incoherent ramblings.

Looking for stability, Cole followed one of his older half brothers into law enforcement.

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Two weeks before the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, he got a job as a San Francisco deputy sheriff. In 1994, he transferred to SFPD, where his early years were marked by violence he would only later recognize as traumatic.

On his first call after the police academy, Cole responded to a report of a woman with a knife in a phone booth saying she wanted to die. When Cole and his partner got to the scene, he recalled, the woman turned and began walking toward them with the knife before dropping it.

"I almost shot somebody two hours into my first shift," he said.

In his first year, Cole fired his gun for the first and only time of his career. He and his partner were chasing a driver, who spun out in a parking lot near what is now Chase Center. When Cole got out to confront him, the driver slammed into Cole, backed up and hit him again, he recalled.

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"I was pinned between the cars," he said. "That's when I started shooting."

To this day, Cole isn't sure whether he struck the driver. The man got away and was not arrested for months, he said.

Then, in early 1996, a suspected Nortenos gang member fired a sawed-off shotgun at Cole and his partner during a foot pursuit in the city's southeast. Cole and his partner were turning the corner into an alley when the blast rang out and missed them.

"I'd always thought those things didn't bother me," Cole said. "I'd just put it away and never think about it again."

Cole with his partner Bella in 2004, when he was with the SFPD canine unit.Courtesy of Davin Cole

But the moment that changed his life came in 2009. That summer, Cole was training a police dog when the animal latched onto his left leg, leaving a golf-ball-size wound in his calf.

The bite became infected and, even worse, healed in a way that pinched a nerve bundle, causing chronic pain throughout his body. His pain was most intense when he stretched his leg in certain ways, like during walks on the beach.

Cole was prescribed Norco, the widely used opioid. It dulled his pain, but he realized something else.

The pills, at least in the beginning, made him happy.

In the early days of his developing addiction, Cole asked his wife, Sonia, for help for the first and only time that she can remember.

"He said to me, 'Sonia, I can't stop taking this pill and I don't want to take it,'" she recalled.

Startled, she told him to talk to his doctor. She remembers him dumping a bottle of Norco into the toilet and flushing it. She thought that was the end of it.

Three years after the bite, a successful surgery on Cole's leg made most of his pain go away. But he didn't want to stop using the pills and told his doctor he was still in pain to keep the prescriptions going.

He sometimes took more pills than he was supposed to, and managed to get extra painkillers from a relative and friends to tide himself over between refills.

Then-Sgt. Cole, left, and officer Robert Rueca of the San Francisco Police Department respond to a 2019 car break-in.Santiago Mejia/The Chronicle 2019

By 2018, he began mixing the pills with alcohol to make them last longer, while telling himself he was fine because he never came to work high or drunk. He fell deeper into what he later realized was depression.

That was the same year David Lazar, who is now the assistant police chief, tapped him to head up the homeless outreach team. "He was really good at what he did," Lazar said. "None of us were aware that he had an addiction."

Some nights, Cole's eyes drooped and he slurred his words. When Sonia confronted him about why he was so sleepy, he told her he had drunk alcohol or taken melatonin.

In his final months as an officer, Cole locked himself in his bedroom every night, getting drunk and listening to sad songs about addiction. He often considered taking his own life, because he felt like he would never get sober.

He picked a spot along the coast near his house where he thought he might drive off a cliff. He figured he could make it look like an accident.

One night that fall, he wept and told Sonia he wanted to die. She tried to calm him and walked him to their bed, where he fell asleep in seconds. The next morning, he did not remember what had happened. She wanted him to go to rehab, but he wanted to wait until after his promotion.

"I was so worried," Sonia recalled. "We have weapons in the house."

Late on the afternoon of Nov. 3, 2021, Cole didn't let on that anything was wrong as he drove one of his two daughters to cheer practice. After dropping her off, he stopped at a Rite Aid, where he bought a bottle of Smirnoff and scoped out the pharmacy near the front entrance.

Returning to his San Mateo home, Cole retrieved a .38-caliber snub-nose revolver from his safe.

If the police caught him, Cole thought, he'd use the gun on himself. He knew it wouldn't misfire like a pistol might.

Cole prepares to be a guest speaker on Doug White's "Tell This Story" podcast in November.Lea Suzuki/The Chronicle

Cole needed to hurry. He wanted to be done in time to pick up his daughter from practice and return home again before his wife. He told himself that, after this one robbery, he would get help for his addiction.

He drove back to the Rite Aid and parked in a lot across the street. It was almost 6 p.m. He took two pulls from the vodka bottle, strapped on a medical mask and surgical gloves, and walked into the store.

He waited several minutes for the pharmacy window to be clear of customers before showing the woman at the counter a note he'd written.

"I HAVE A GUN GIVE ME NORCO DO NOT PUSH ALARM!! HURRY!!"

Then Cole watched his plan come apart. The woman went into a backroom with her colleagues, and one of them called the police. When a pharmacist returned to the counter with nine bottles of Norco in a plastic bag, Cole showed her the other side of the note.

"SORRY!! DOCTORS F'D ME UP WAIT 15 MINS TO CALL COPS."

As Cole left the store, a police cruiser cut him off. He ran, but an officer chased him into the middle of the street, drawing his gun and yelling at Cole to stop.

The acting lieutenant slowed to a walk and reached for his waistband, but did not pull out his gun. He dropped first to his knees, then to the ground, after the officer threatened to stun him with a Taser.

"I'm f -- ed," Cole yelled through tears, before revealing he was an off-duty cop. "My life is over."

In the back of the patrol car, he banged his head against the cage. He cried for the next several hours. At the police station, two officers watched him. Cole remembers one wiping his nose and eyes with a tissue.

"Don't let the docs give you pills," he told them.

As the hours went by, Cole missed calls and texts from his wife. She recalls asking herself whether he'd killed himself: "Am I going to find him somewhere in his car?"

Finally, Cole called her from the police station in San Mateo. "Sonia," he told her. "Please know that I'm so sorry."

Twice that night in a holding cell, he grabbed the cord from a phone on the wall and wrapped it around his neck.

Cole never planned to survive getting arrested for the robbery. When he did, the gravity of his situation quickly settled in. He was going to lose his job -- and could even spend time in prison.

After his wife bailed him out early the next morning, they cried together for hours. Cole had to tell his daughters what he had done, but couldn't talk about it in the first-person.

"When people have an addiction," Cole remembers telling his girls. "Sometimes they will go and do bad things."

Cole and his wife, Sonia Cole, react as their family and friends share what they are grateful for on Thanksgiving Day in San Mateo.Lea Suzuki/The Chronicle

The day after his arrest, SFPD officers arrived at his house and watched him to make sure he didn't hurt himself. They took away his guns, secured him a spot at a rehab center in Sonoma County, and drove him there the next morning. He was suspended without pay immediately.

His first full day at rehab, Cole walked into a communal room and saw his face splashed across the television. His arrest had hit the news.

San Mateo County prosecutors charged him with six felony robbery and gun counts as well as a misdemeanor for resisting arrest. "I don't care who it is," the district attorney, Steve Wagstaffe, said at the time.

Cole retired from the force before he could be disciplined or fired. As soon as he got out of rehab, he began counseling and tried to understand how he'd gotten so desperate. Why hadn't he just asked for help? His therapist eventually told him he had PTSD and was self-medicating with the pills and alcohol.

In late 2022, Cole pleaded no contest to two felony robbery charges. Four days before Christmas, he said goodbye to Sonia and walked into a courtroom. As soon as the judge sentenced him to a year in jail, deputies cuffed him and took him away.

Because he had been a cop, Cole was locked in a cell alone. He spent all but 30 minutes a day by himself, reading, meditating and playing solitaire.

He had worried about what it would mean for an ex-officer to get locked up. He was afraid other inmates would harass him or taint his food. But as he lay on a 2-inch mattress, he talked to other incarcerated men through the vents beneath his concrete bed.

Word of his arrest spread quickly. At first, he shared his version of events only with the deputies. Then inmates began walking up to the window of his cell and asking him what really happened. As Cole opened up, his fears dissipated.

Six months into his sentence, Cole was released from jail. He walked out on Father's Day 2023 to greet his wife in the same suit and tie he wore to his sentencing.

Cole thumbs through a locker of clothing, including his police uniform, in November while searching for an item in San Mateo.Lea Suzuki/The Chronicle

On a recent morning, Cole sat at a computer in his garage, surrounded by mementos from his time as a cop.

His forearms were marked by a pair of tattoos he acquired after jail, one of them reminding him to take life a day at a time. A "cheer dad" cap peered out from a box on the cabinet behind him.

He had just finished sharing his life story on Doug White's "Tell This Story" podcast, one of many such appearances he's made over the past year.

He's tapped into a community of first responders around the nation and abroad who've wrestled with trauma, addiction and other issues. He hopes officers who hear his story will seek treatment instead of making a life-changing mistake.

"I'm in a unique position to help people," Cole said.

As he spoke, his wife and two daughters moved about inside. Sonia had decided to stay with him, despite all the hardship.

"We have talked about so many things in so many ways," she said. "What always prevails is, 'I'm not going to leave you at your weakest.'"

Sonia said she worries about all of the people suffering with addiction on the street, with little support -- and Cole still does, too.

Former SFPD Sgt. Cole gets a hug after Najat Echchoukairi, a staff member at Muddy Waters Coffee House in San Francisco, spotted him at a table in November. Echchoukairi knows Cole from his work as an SFPD sergeant at Mission Police Station.Lea Suzuki/The Chronicle

On Monday evenings for more than a year, he has volunteered for Street Life Ministries, a nonprofit that helps people struggling with homelessness and addiction. He loads trays of bread, fried chicken and vegetables into a van in Redwood City and delivers the meals to a food bank, where dozens of hungry people await his arrival.

Cole believes his arrest saved his life. He said he hasn't taken painkillers in the three years since his arrest or had a drink since the week he got out of jail. But he still wishes he wouldn't have robbed the pharmacy.

"It's the worst decision I ever made, but it ended up being the best decision for me mentally. It got me sober, got me into therapy," he said. "It's given me this voice."

Cole isn't sure what's next. His felony conviction means he can no longer work as a peace officer in California, and he's on probation until December. While he collects a pension for the 27 years he worked before the robbery, he was jobless until this past holiday season, when a friend hired him to drive for a high-end car service in the city.

In the spring, he hopes to share his story with officers at the San Mateo Police Department, the agency that arrested him. He also wants to write a book someday.

He tells others considering recovery -- including officers -- that the road ahead will be rough and painful.

"But when you come out of there," he said, "you're going to have happiness like you haven't had in years."

Reach Michael Barba: michael.barba@sfchronicle.com

Jan 21, 2025

Michael Barba

Accountability & Public Safety Reporter

Michael Barba is a reporter covering government accountability and public safety for the Chronicle. He has covered San Francisco since 2015, first as a staff writer for the San Francisco Examiner and later as a senior reporter for the San Francisco Standard. During his time at the Standard, Barba's reporting led to criminal charges against a building inspector who inspected his own home. He also revealed that Mayor London Breed secretly directed her appointees to sign undated resignation letters, spurring a new law barring the practice. In 2022, Barba was honored by the Northern California Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists with its Journalist of the Year award. He is a Los Angeles native and a graduate of San Francisco State University.

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prohibitionist	prohibition_agency	drugwar_propaganda	legalization	drug_reformer
reform_referenda	cannabis	stimulant	narcotic	hallucinogen

incarceration/prison mentioned? yes .

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EXP - explicit prohibition propaganda (explicit_propaganda)	GRP - hated group (propaganda_theme1)	MAD - madness, violence, illness (propaganda_theme2)
SOC - survival of society (propaganda_theme3)	USE - gateway, use is abuse (propaganda_theme4)	KID - children (propaganda_theme5)
WAR - demonize, war, epidemic (propaganda_theme6)	TOT - total prohibition (propaganda_theme7)	DIS - dissent opposed (propaganda_theme8)

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incarceration/prison mentioned? yes .

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