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BART Police detectives are seeking help from the public to identify this male suspect (images below) who is wanted in connection with a stabbing that occurred on September 17, 2025, outside the Daly City BART Station. Prior to the stabbing, the suspect was seen in the company of the pictured female. The suspect in these photos is a male, wearing a black hat, black sweatshirt, gray jeans or pants, and white shoes. BART Police detectives urge anyone with information about either person, or any information related to this incident, to call the BART PD Anonymous Tip line at 510-464-7011.

The stabbing last month happened near the bus zone at Daly City Station. An adult male suffered a stab wound that required hospitalization.

On the evening of Friday, July 19, 2024, BART will perform planned maintenance on the official BART app starting at around 3pm and lasting several hours. During the maintenance, the BART Trip Planner, real time train departures, service alerts, and the fare calculator will continue to be available on the app.  Parking payment features will not be available however parking is free after 3pm and on weekends and the maintenance will be complete in time for weekday riders. For those looking to reserve parking in advance during the maintenance window, they will get a prompt to try again on Saturday when the maintenance is complete. BART’s website for purchasing reserving parking will also be impacted during the same timeframe.

The profile and account setting features will also not be available on the app beginning at around 3pm on July 19, 2024, and lasting several hours.

Following the maintenance, app users will be prompted to update to the latest version of the app.

BART's innovative Art Program is making a huge difference in the transit experience of our riders.  Since its inception in the 1960s, BART has prioritized bringing art and cultural experiences to stations. On our latest edition of “Hidden Tracks: Stories from BART,” BART Art Program Manager Jennifer Easton discusses the wide range of projects her one-woman department has undertaken – from murals and fashion shows to poetry contests and safety initiatives – and makes the case for the importance of weaving art and culture into the transit experience.  

(TRANSCRIPT BELOW)

ROBERTSON: “Welcome to ‘Hidden Tracks: Stories from BART,’ I’m Michelle Robertson with BART Communications, and today I have the honor of being your host on this edition of Hidden Tracks. I'll be speaking with Jennifer Easton, BART's Art Program Manager. So, it's been a busy few years for Jennifer, who is the sole employee in the art program I'd like to point out. She has led a ton of projects that are hoping to make our stations more welcoming, safer, and let's face it, just nice places to be in while you're waiting for your train. In some ways, our stations are museums, not only for their architectural integrity, but also for many of the striking and historic artworks within and without. And we keep adding more. Jennifer, welcome to Hidden Track. 

EASTON: Thank you, Michelle. I'm so happy to be here. 

ROBERSTON: What prepared you for this role? 

EASTON: I wish I could say I graduated nuclear scientist or something really tricky and try to dovetail from there. But I did start, my degree is in art history and museum studies, so, that's the road I went down. And I had been doing curatorial work for a number of years.  I was a research assistant at LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) in Los Angeles and then I realized that all my colleagues were moving to very small towns and other places to kind of build their careers. And I was actually really interested in staying in Los Angeles at the time and I had early in college done some work around public art, really early on and kind of dovetailed back into that in Los Angeles and it just kind of went from there. It was a burgeoning field at the time and what was interesting to me and what's always been interesting is I'm a generalist in a lot of ways, right? I love just like the layers that public art is. I have to know construction. I have to know community engagement. I have to know artists. I have to know all these different cool things that I get to, so every day, I mean, maybe it's my ADHD, you know, it's like I get attached to 88 different projects.

I mean at a certain point I moved from Los Angeles to the Bay Area, and I went to tech and I was doing tech marketing, so I learned marketing when that kind of went downhill. I went into nonprofit management and I was doing PR and marketing and that and fundraising. So, I've learned all these crazy skills and then I was ultimately running the public art program for the City of San Jose, which is a pretty big program. Then this opened up and it was like my dream job, because I'd always been a BART girl and have loved transit, have used transit, and I always felt like the early BART program had art in it, but it never really advanced very far. Grace Crunican, the GM at the time, who had come from Seattle, had seen how positive that program was to the success of their transit system and brought it. We had always had somebody kind of babysitting art projects or doing some of the art projects, some of my colleagues when I started here had been doing like that San Francisco extension, there's art there, but it never really been focal. So, when they decided to do this, I was like, let me please let me and that's how I came to do it. I mean, it's really it is a field for people really interested in like a lot of different things, which is kind of exactly where my brain goes. So, it’s fun!

ROBERTSON: I want to talk about a project that's currently underway at Fruitvale Station that I think is indicative of a lot of the work that you do. You're working with BART's longtime community partner, the Unity Council, to create a street gallery at the station. That's what they're calling it and the Unity Council describes the project as a transformation of the station into a living canvas that reflects the rich culture and diversity of the Fruitvale community. Tell us more about that. 

EASTON: So, I'll go back to Grace stating early one she wanted this art program and I think one of the things that she said to me early on and I will say our current GM, Robert Powers, is right on that page, too, is that our stations really need to be more reflective of our communities, and they need to be better partners with our communities, right? And it's not that just the person who drives in drops their car, comes back, drives away. But it's really like, how are we a better partner to our neighborhoods where we are? Because as we know, our history is not 100% grand in that, and I think we are still thinking about what does that look like? How can we be part of the, if it’s still people are still considering it healing or just like new direction, so how do we be part of that dialog? So, Unity Council, was a partner in the Oscar Grant mural and, that day, I think day two, I was called in and I was asked, can you work with Oscar Grant's family? They really want to do a mural at the Fruitvale Station to honor him. It's interesting because, then I was going out there and I had several people come up to me and, this is not too long after Oscar had been killed, and it's like, is this the station? 

The people didn't really have a sense of the place. There were a lot of people visiting to kind of as part of their healing process, as part of their like learning about it. And so the notion of creating that mural became really important and I thought it was really, kudos to BART for stepping into that space, because I know this has happened in other transit agencies and I wouldn't say this always happens where they go in collaboration with the family. I mean, it's always a tense relationship, understandably. So, the Unity Council, because they are representatives of that neighborhood, very strong representatives of the Fruitvale, they came on as a partner to make sure that everybody felt comfortable. Well, not comfortable, but to make sure everybody was in dialog about, just that they were in support of the family, the mural being there at the station and helping to be in that dialog about how this could be very successful.

So, I really appreciated their voice at the table during that process. But as we were talking and as we were doing that project, the Unity Council and I were talking about these other columns, and they have new housing that they've been building there. So, really kind of start to make that feel more like their vision of the Fruitvale got put on hold. Everybody got busy and then post COVID a lot of neighborhoods have been, challenged, right? Safety, security, businesses closing, things like that and Fruitvale is one of our busiest stations. So, the conversation came back again, and the Unity Council said, we'll raise the money. I supported them on with some funds. But, as a percentage, hardly anything, just to get the project up and running and then they've hired already four amazing artists, including the artists who painted the Oscar Grant mural, Refa One, and we're painting the columns, and it just makes the station come alive because it came from a place of love for the community ,expression of the community and they see it just as like a gateway to all the other beauty that's in the Fruitvale. So, they're seeing the beauty of a place where other people might say, oh, this or that, but they're all in on making the Fruitvale a place for their community. So, it just that just felt like a win for BART as far as what Grace had laid out to me early on and what the community wants to see from BART as a partner. 

ROBERSTON: This is a big question. Why does BART have an art program? And we've had one forever, like you said. Why did the founders make sure we had an art program, which was novel at the time? A lot of agencies didn't have art in the station. Why did they want us to have one and why do we need to continue funding this program, especially as we're in this fiscal crisis? 

EASTON: It's a great and big question. The early stations were, their early thinking about the stations; if you look at them, the system was not designed by one architect. It was designed by many, many architects and I think the notion was to have that sense of uniqueness, that the system was not monolithic, that you had different experiences in different places.

I will say it was a little hodgepodge at first. A rumor I heard from the artist who's since passed away, who did the relief carvings in like Richmond and Lake Merritt and many other stations. He said, yeah, one of the guys came to this concrete conferences I was at in San Francisco and said, you need to work on our BART system? He said, okay. 

ROBERTSON: A concrete conference?

EASTON: Right? However, there was an early arts committee with some very important art critics, curators, and artists on it who were, that's who were grabbing those early artists and looking at the diversity. I mean, they made sure they were from Contra Costa, Alameda, and San Francisco counties. And I think it was really, again, there was no plan to have art in all the stations, but they did want to have these moments, as we still say surprise and delight. They did want, art was really starting to be seen. Public art was starting to come into its own. It was still more that what is now called plop art. The grand sculpture by important artists in a plaza.

ROBERSTON: Did you say plop art?

EASTON: Drop it in one place to drop a big sculpture in a place. Plop it down. 

ROBERSTON: I love that. Why don't love that? Because it's very thoughtless. 

EASTON: Well, sometimes it I mean, there are some places, like the Alexander Calder in Chicago that that become iconic, but for the most part, yes, it typically is really about the artist and not the place. But integrative art was happening and if you look back to like Paris and New York and some of these old systems, you see beautiful tile work, so you see these things you appreciate. And so, it was as we've gone along, I think we're just getting kind of following that breadcrumb trail. But as we've been talking about hopefully, it's kind of starting to make sense of why it makes sense to keep it going.

At the end of the day, there are a lot of hard decisions that will have to be made relative to the fiscal cliff, right? Where does the money come from? I will say that even though my program was authorized at 2% of construction costs, it has never worked on that. We've never implemented that. We are finding, like the key projects where it work and finding like what's the budget we can work within to make an impact.

So, we've been, I mean we the royal we, has been actually doing that since the beginning and it's never changed, and I think there are ways to do this efficiently. There's ways to do it boldly and broadly. New York, L.A., they have good sized programs. They deliver lots of amazing projects. We have never been that. So, how do we blend all those things together to create a result, you know what I mean instead of being formulaic?

ROBERTSON: Safety. I want to push this subject a little more. One of my profound experiences with art and safety has been in 19th Street Station, which is my home station. You were heavily involved in this modernization project. There were so many different pieces to it. We opened up the concourse. We tore down all these pillars and walls and opened up the line of sight. So now when I enter the station, I can see directly across it. So, there's no one lurking in dark corners. We replace the lighting with LED lights, more sustainable but also brighter. I especially want to point out that there are these incredible light boxes. Is that what they're called? They're almost like murals, but they're illuminated light box murals made by three local artists, and they're put in the stairwells. So, when I'm walking down the stairs to go catch my train to San Francisco, there's this lit up thing and again, it's less creepy because sometimes stairwells can be creepy as a woman. It's not only bright and adding light to the space, but it's so much fun. There's the Saunders Daisy, it's a bright yellow daisy, and it just perks me up. 

EASTON: Yeah, when we did that project, when it was planned it was before COVID and the platforms were so crowded, particularly at rush hours, and people weren't using the stairs and in a number of stations. So, this is all part of the station modernization program that has since kind of been been modified. I won't say put on hold, but it's been modified and how we go about it, and I'm glad we got 19th Street done and Powell Street because they were two critical stations.

A lot of the station we were having to look at how do we get extra stairwell capacity in there for emergency egress and things like that. I came upon it and it was like glass in stairwells. However, it has been fine. People are not using them as bathrooms and people are being I mean we were careful how we installed them, how we created them. There's room for the mops to move around bikes, whatever. The glass can withstand certain things. But people are using the stairwells more. They are willing to do it, like you say. How do you create a sense of better sense of comfort in a place through the artwork?

We also have light boxes on the concourse level with changeable art and another thing I will be working on shortly is changing that out with either a local artist or local arts organization, or potentially images from our fashion show, because they're so fun to just bring that out. So, it's another way to kind of create that special uniqueness to a place with artwork. Then the whole theme of the artwork is, of the station is really about Uptown Oakland as being an arts district and the city wanting that as a kind of a thing. First Fridays, music venues, all that sort of stuff as more people are moving into the new apartments, making this a place where people want to be where, where it's exciting and as we're dealing with, the backlash against COVID and just like new workforce, the work-live relationships, things like that. I think we're really, that station is just like people come in, they're like, wow, it really does feel like a place that I feel pretty darn good about moving through and being in, you know? And it doesn't mean it's like perfect. It's not. People still like are people. They're still peeling some of the letters off of my project. But I just have to figure that out. It doesn't mean, it hasn't stopped us from being human and there's humans on the street. We're humans. Humans do human stuff. But I think just having us all feel like we want to be in the space makes us feel like generally safer in the space, because we're all kind of part of it. We're all using it. We're all engaging in it on our own volition and because it feels like a better space.

ROBERTSON: Those light boxes I haven't seen, like graffiti on them. They didn't get broken, no one’s smashed. I think we have a culture in America of not necessarily respecting our public spaces and if you're going into this dark box of a station that looks crappy, it makes you want to defile things because it already looks bad. But when you have art there, I don't think people are prone to like, messing with stuff.

EASTON: Right, that was, which New York mayor, I think it was Giuliani, who did that with the New York subway. Right, and if a train got tagged, it came off the line and BART does that too. If a train gets tagged right, it gets brought off the line. 

So, we want to put our best foot forward for folks. We have a really zero tolerance policy for graffiti. We try and get rid of it as fast as possible because we've brought on more cleaners. We're thinking about our spaces, making sure they look as good as we can. However, that's just part and parcel of it, right? So, if you start with a bar that's bringing light levels up, all that sort of stuff, that's that part of the magic.

ROBERTSON: What BART stations would you consider destinations?

EASTON: Well, I mean, now, Fruitvale. So, that's an interesting question because for me, it's both the physical station, but also where the station is. I also think of it as an extension of the neighborhood. So, I love the Fruitvale neighborhood. There's so many great restaurants and it's just fun. 16th and 24th, I think are really fun stations for different reasons. Do you want to talk about?

ROBERTSON: I want to talk about 16th and 24th Street very briefly. Jennifer, or actually customer services got an email from a woman saying her mother is this famous public artist who created the tilescapes is what we're calling them, mosaics in 16th and 24th Street. And you don’t necessarily notice them because I used to live there, and I just moved through the station, but there's, like, these beautiful, honestly, murals on the concourse and on the platform. They were created by this woman, Janet Bennett. I want to point out, Janet has never really been recognized. She was tying these, you know, right before the station open. She was an OG BART artist. Meanwhile, there's these William Mitchell concrete reliefs at the station that are in every must-see historic art in the Bay Area. So, we got in touch with Janet Bennett, who is in her 90s and living in New York City and we got to have this amazing conversation with her and bring her story to light. She was interviewed on the news after we spoke to her. And my favorite part of that interview, god I love Janet, we got to get in touch with her. She said, I'm open to work if you're hiring, let me know. Somebody reached out, so we'll have to follow up and see if she actually did that. 

But that's just another great example of how communications and the art program work together, because there's stories to tell about these stations and about the art in these stations and about what, people consider Janet's work decoration, but it is so not that. 

EASTON: No, I mean, it really definitely had a consciousness behind it in the design. What we also learned is she created the mosaics at LAX, which were also very critical to changing those long hallways to make them more….

ROBERTSON: These are in the tunnels. The famous tunnels at LAX, and it was misattributed. 

EASTON: Same thing. Misattributed. Her boss took credit because she did not. She had to move on to another job after she designed them, and the same year I think she moved on to a different job after. No, she was here through the end, I would take that back. Remember because there's a picture of her with them being installed and she worked with Heath Tiles another woman-owned business, Bay Area business. So, that's a really interesting discussion about how many of our artists also work with local artisans, right? Or local fabricators. So again, they're often seeking out the local, the bespoke, the custom and I often will connect them to local fabricators instead of ones from out of the area because we want to try and keep these dollars local as well. So, another kind of layer of that economic dialog too. 

ROBERTSON: So, I don't think most of us know what goes into getting a public art project done. I certainly don't. I'm like, oh, they're like throwing it up there and it's the thing and wow, that was fast. I recently sat on a selection panel for an artist for BART police's new headquarters, which are going to be right in the heart of downtown Oakland at the 20th Street exit of 19th Street Station, like in front of the Paramount, yes, the Paramount. I mixed that up with the Fox sometimes and across from this gorgeous patina building where the coffee shop Tierra Mia is currently located. The old I Magnin, the department store, Yes. It’s a police station. We opened this conversation talking about Oscar Grant and talking about policing and how we're re-envisioning safety, that's been such a key piece of this conversation and BART police headquarters is going to be right there and on this panel, we are having all these conversations about what it means for this police department to be headquartered right there in this historic neighborhood with the history it has, and how do we make it a part of this place? And, you know, make it not just this dark, bureaucratic building, but a beautiful contribution to the space where if something does happen to you, you feel welcome to walk in there. So, this panel was so eye opening, and it just takes so much expertise and work and collaboration. Walk us through the process of ushering a public art project, into existence through the lens of our new, forthcoming headquarters for BART police.

EASTON: No project is rote.  I think that's the whole point of thinking about each project uniquely, in its place, in its community and its function. So, that's where you start is like, what's the basis? What's the building? What’s the built environment. In this case it is to your point, it's an existing building that started out as a bank. It's a very 1980s building. Let's be honest. It's not the world's most attractive building and in our conversations, in our initial conversations and this is what's so funny about my job as I sit next to the person who does environmental clearance for BART and he was doing environmental clearance on this building, and he so he had been doing outreach to some of what we would call, communities of interest. He reached out to the Uptown Downtown Association and they're like, it was a Kaiser building up until recently. We bought it, the building from Kaiser. Their concern was the street presence of the building. When we were in conversation with the police department early on in the project, is this like they don't have a ton of money for this building, right? So again, it's like, what can the art do? It was really critical that we cannot drop something that feels like Fort Knox in the middle of downtown Oakland and expect to be welcome.

ROBERTSON: But you also have to balance that. It is a police station.

EASTON: It is a police station, right. So you have to harden the building and do all those fun things.

ROBERTSON: But what role does art play, it has so many different things it does?

EASTON: “So that's why we want to bring artists on early and so that's one of the things we try and do really often. So, when we are kind of formulating what the project is, it’s like when can when does the artist come in?  I have some projects, I will be honest that I've brought the artists in and say, great, we're going to bring them early. They’re sitting on the shelf as we speak because BART brings projects to a certain point and depending on the finances or whatever, it could go on the shelf for a while. I mean, I was here six years before my first project finished. You know, my first construction project finished.

ROBERTSON: What was that project? 

EASTON: I think it was El Cerrito del Norte, the new mosaics at El Cerrito del Norte, maybe five, but I think the six and then came Powell and the 19th, right? But those all were in process. They had just started when I started here. So, six years later. But this one, it was really critical because it is a design build project. Progressive design, even more aggressive that the artist is part of the design team. So, her voice, Vicki Scurry, she's going to be in that process when they're considering hardening, when they're considering reinforcing the parking lot. So, how do we do it? 

She came and spent, she's from Seattle, she came and spent a week here after she was selected, by our committee of police officers, community members, artists, you know, arts advisors, yourself, the project manager to really get a bunch of different voices in there, to really think about how do we make this something that reflects what I heard from the community as far as making this a place that doesn't feel, like doesn't add to a negative sense of this group, it adds to a positive sense of history? And everybody knows it has to function, there has to be a way in for the police to park their cars or whatever. There has to be secured parking. We understand that there's also a new cafe opening across the street, so I think there's an expectation. It's like, oh great, more employees here. So how do we build on that positive stuff.

The police have been really great about this. Like, no, we don't want to have shields and badges and pledges and that. We want it to reflect our values, but we want to be a good community partner and the police, you remember they were saying that at the meeting is that they want to be a place that the community actually feels like is part of their community.

ROBERTSON: All right. Jennifer, this was such a lovely conversation. Do you have any final thoughts? 

EASTON: We didn't talk a lot about the collection and what it means to maintain a collection and it is like maintaining buildings, right? BART has, for better or worse, a lot of times been hands off with the artwork because there hasn't been somebody in my position to kind of shepherd that along. So, it's just like, how do we bring recognition internally as an organization? And then because I've had people interview me, it's like, oh, this collection's amazing, and why don't you do a map? Because I really need to get out there and get some stuff cleaned, you know what I mean? So, it's just like, as a party of one. I'm so fortunate I now have somebody who's assisting me for a period of time. She's at San Francisco State in a graduate program, and she's really excited about collection management.

So, she's helping me be that part of my brain to kind of get the collection into our inventory system and things like that. But it is a critical, part of doing that putting it out there is making sure it looks great for years to come and that it generationally kind of continues on, and then it starts to be part of those layers of the story, of the history of BART, and that we save it and talking about our historic preservation, now that we're 50 years old, we have to have some of those conversations. How are we part of that conversation? And just like continuing to respect our system and make the spaces as amazing as possible and have the best system possible, 

ROBERTSON: Jennifer, we're so lucky to have at BART. I am so lucky. Talk about surprise and delight, you surprise and delight me every day. Thank you for joining us for Hidden Tracks: stories from BART. You can listen to the podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Play, and of course on our website at BART.gov/podcasts. Now get out there and check out some BART art, please.”

BART to OAK service will be undergoing planned maintenance on its trackway equipment beginning Wednesday, October 16 until Thursday, October 31. The work will begin at approximately 9pm each night and last until 7am each morning of the work period.  During the maintenance window of 9pm-7am, one track will remain in operation, and trains will arrive every 18 minutes, rather than every 9 minutes.  

This work is necessary preventative maintenance which will help ensure that the BART to OAK service remains safe and reliable. 

We apologize for this inconvenience and appreciate your patience.

A photo of Crisis Intervention Specialist Rahman Bagby in Lake Merritt Station. 

In October 2024, Alec decided he’d had enough. 

He had been living on the street for about three years, struggling with severe substance addiction, when he finally decided it was time to get help. 

His first call was to BART Crisis Intervention Specialist Rahman Bagby.  

Bagby had known Alec for about a year by the time the young man said he was ready to make a change. In that time, Bagby and his CIS partner Ontreal Wiltz, had made contact with Alec more than 20 times.  

Bagby and Wiltz first met Alec on the street by Powell St. Station in San Francisco. During their initial encounter, Alec was still standing upright, wearing clean clothes and shoes. He wasn’t open to services, but he wasn’t disgruntled when Bagby and Wiltz offered.  

“I told him, ‘Look, I’ll get you something to eat, but can you put me in touch with a family member?’” Bagby said. 

Some months later, Alec relented, giving Bagby and Wiltz his mom’s phone number.  

“We’re with your son, Alec. He’s been living on the street,” Bagby said when Alec’s mom picked up. 

CIS Rahman Bagby and CIS Lataisha Marin responding to a call in San Francisco. 

Alec’s mom hadn’t heard from her son in about two years. One day he was in touch with her via phone, the next, silence. Before Bagby and Wiltz got involved, she said the last contact she had with Alec, who had lost multiple phones, was in 2022 from Santa Rita Jail, where he was being held after failure to appear in court following multiple arrests and infractions.  

Alec’s mom said that before he began living on the street, he was a bright student who earned his master's degree in chemistry at UCLA in 2016 and intended to continue his studies in a doctorate program.  

But Alec had been struggling with a chronic back problem for some time, and following an unsuccessful discectomy surgery, his life began to unravel.  

Like so many others, Alec became addicted to opioid-based painkillers, which eventually led him to harder drugs, like heroin and fentanyl. He was also self-medicating with alcohol and marijuana.  

Alec’s family had tried for years to give him the support he needed, paying for housing and food. But he continued to abuse drugs and alcohol and refused to seek employment or medical treatment. For some time, he bounced between various short-term rentals.  

Then in 2020, his parents received a call from a hospital in Oakland informing them he'd been resuscitated with Narcan for an overdose. His family begged him to get help, but he refused and began acting paranoid as well as destructive. Eventually a warrant was issued for his arrest. He became homeless, which he always claimed was his biggest fear.  

With guidance from Bagby and Wiltz, Alec’s mom leapt into action, hiring an interventionist and connecting the CISes with a facility and provider who would take him.  

"I could sense her love for her son,” Bagby said of Alec’s mom. “She has so much heart and so much grit.” 

CIS Lataisha Marin and CIS Rahman Bagby respond to a call.

Supporting a family member with severe drug addiction is challenging and devastating.  Alec’s mother, who asked to remain anonymous, had been trying for years to get Alec the help he needed before he disappeared. It was a struggle. Many organizations weren’t right for Alec or wouldn’t accept him. Often it felt like there was no place for him at all.  

It took months and months of research, contacting organizations, and a large financial investment until she was able to find a program that might be right for her son. 

“You have to advocate endlessly,” she said by phone. “People in the state my son was in cannot deal with the bureaucracy of social services. You have to be able to communicate eloquently and be persistent, and he couldn’t do that.”  

Bagby and Wiltz networked for Alec’s mom, connecting her with organizations that might suit her son’s needs. Eventually, she got to know the entire BART Crisis Intervention team. For the first time in a long time, she had hope that she could get him into the right rehabilitation setting.  

“Without Rahman, Alec wouldn’t be in recovery today,” she said. “He totally committed himself to Alec. He was always available, would call me when he saw Alec on the street so I could connect him with the interventionist.”  

“Alec felt so comfortable with Rahman, and with his help, we were able to stabilize him,” she continued. “Rahman was the one who truly understood Alec, and he coordinated so many efforts.” 

She said Bagby took her son to a safe place and stayed with him while he slept, waiting for transport to the rehab community his mom connected him with.  

Bagby said rapport building is crucial and understanding that getting someone help can be a process requiring repeated interactions. 

“You’re working with people on stages of change,” Bagby explained. “Many of them are in the pre-contemplation stage of their addiction – they're not addressing the issue, and they don’t want to. Sometimes, they’re not quite ready, but they’re grateful you spoke to them.”  

Bagby says you must lead with compassion and patience in his line of work. 

“You have to embrace the challenge and recognize that a lot of times when you’re talking to people, it’s the drugs, the addiction talking back to you,” he said.  

With Alec, Bagby focused on talking to him about his declining health in order to get him to a place where he might consider treatment.  

“You are not able to sustain what you’re putting your body through,” he told Alec. “It resonated with him. He knew he was not comfortable. And I always said, ‘Alec, you’re the expert, I’m just here to help if you want it.” 

The turning point was when Alec recognized his complete physical exhaustion.  

“I’m not comfortable,” he told Bagby, who replied, “As soon as you tell me to go, I have transportation and a facility for you. This can be immediate.”  

CIS Rahman Bagby on duty.

Alec is still in treatment today, a process full of setbacks but also incremental wins. He successfully transitioned out of his residency program to a partial hospitalization program, and he is now under full LPS conservatorship, which Bagby said is “an amazing feat for his mother.” The legal process applies to adults who are unable to meet their own basic needs due to severe mental illness and appoints a conservator to help ensure the individual receives appropriate care.  

“This is a long process, but he’s on an upward trajectory,” Bagby said. “He’s still on his path, and that is very hopeful.” 

Alec’s mom’s support is strong as ever, and she keeps in close touch with Bagby.  

“The BART Crisis Intervention team is the only organization that gave me any help in getting Alec into treatment,” she said.  

Her advice to those with a family member facing addiction and homelessness: “Get educated about the interventionist and rehabilitation community. Start the conversation with anyone you can. And do not give up.”  

Bagby was recognized for his efforts at the 2024 BART Police Awards Ceremony, where he was named Civilian of the Year. Bagby grew up in Oakland, and prior to becoming a CIS, he worked as a BART Train Operator and System Service Worker.  

Crisis Intervention Specialists and Transit Ambassadors are members of BART Police’s Progressive Policing and Community Engagement Bureau (PPCEB). Launched in 2020, the PPCEB builds on more than a decade of progressive reforms aimed at elevating equitable policing and ensuring BART is welcoming to all riders. The unarmed CISes and ambassadors work in special engagement teams to boost visible presence in the system and connect people with support services.   

In a first-of-its-kind in the United States partnership between a government transit system and a popular boba brand, BART is collaborating with Yifang Taiwan Fruit Tea Northern California by featuring BART’s anime mascots on drink menu items and limited-edition collector cupsleeves as well as in-store photo spots. Collaborations between beverage brands and hit anime series and movies are wildly popular and BART is jumping in on the trend to engage new riders and promote BART to new audiences. 

The collaboration and cupsleeve giveaway will launch on Wednesday, October 16, 2024, at four Yifang locations in the Bay Area all located within one mile of a BART station. The collaboration will last through the month of October or while supplies last. 

The exclusive cupsleeves feature four of BART’s Anime Mascots­— Baylee and her goat fan, Nimbus, Mira, and Jasmine enjoying fruit tea drinks, the BART logo, as well as Yifang’s logo. Yifang locations have paired special menu combinations with BART's Anime Mascots by matching their color palettes or character personalities.

The four locations include:

• University of California, Berkeley Yifang:  2516 Bancroft Way, Berkeley (near Downtown Berkeley BART Station)
• Colma Yifang: 4923 Junipero Serra Blvd, Colma (near Colma BART Station)
• San Francisco Chinatown Yifang: 870 Washington Street, San Francisco (near Montgomery BART Station)
• Walnut Creek: 1349 Locust St, Walnut Creek (Near Walnut Creek BART Station)

Planned pop-up events:

Inspired by fan events celebrating anime, gaming, and K-pop, BART is planning pop-up events at two Yifang locations featuring the BART Anime standees and special giveaways. For these planned events, anyone who comes in a full-body BART themed costume or BART Anime Mascot cosplay will receive a BART Anime sticker sheet with their cupsleeve, while supplies last.

• Wednesday, October 16th at the Berkeley Yifang location 3pm-6pm.
• Wednesday, October 30th at the Colma Yifang location 5pm-7pm. 

“As BART works to strengthen relationships with youth and young adults to increase ridership, this collaboration is meant to surprise and delight potential riders and offer an immersive consumer experience that appeals to anime fans,” said BART’s Chief Communications Officer Alicia Trost who launched BART’s Anime Mascot Program to promote public transportation use, especially among youth riders, a growing and reliable ridership demographic. 

“This cross-promotional marketing opportunity is a way to celebrate our classic Taiwanese flavored drinks as well as BART’s anime mascots that were inspired not just by Bay Area culture but also transit systems in Taiwan which use anime mascots to connect with their communities,” said Alexus Lopez, Marketing Manager for Yifang NorCal. 

Yifang offers gourmet Taiwanese tea drinks at multiple locations across the Bay Area. Their most sought-out drink, Yifang Fruit Tea, uses home-made organic cane sugar, seasonal fresh fruits, and natural ingredients. 

Updated May 22, 2025

On May 22, 2025, the BART Board of Directors were given updates about two service disruptions. The video is posted above. They talked about this incident as well as the incident on May 20, 2025 when an electrical fault started a fire near the San Leandro Station causing a major service outage in parts of the East Bay. 

Regular BART service resumed at around 9am this morning, Friday, May 9, following an earlier problem that prevented trains from being safely dispatched for passenger service, which typically takes place at 5am on weekdays. 

The root cause of the disruption was related to network devices having intermittent connectivity. Staff in the Operations Control Center lacked the visibility of the track circuits and the train positions necessary for safe operations. Visibility of this system in the Operations Control Center is required to run service.  

BART issued its first service advisory at 4:30am, alerting the public that BART service was suspended systemwide until further notice.   

BART’s Network Engineering team identified and isolated a redundant sector of the network that was causing intermittent visibility and disconnected it. This allowed service to begin. The East Bay section of the BART system began running passenger trains first, shortly before 9am, and systemwide service began just before 9:30am. 

During the period when there was no BART service, BART’s leadership sent extra staff who usually work at headquarters to stations across the system to alert people as they arrived that there was no BART service. Calls were made to bus agencies asking them to scale up their service as much as possible and to offer free rides from our stations. The San Francisco Bay Ferry deployed their larger vessels to help. BART General Manager Robert Powers was inside the Operations Control Center to receive rapid updates and monitor performance.  

“We apologize for the disruptive morning and not having train service to get people where they need to go,” said Powers. “Reliability is our brand, and we understand the impact when the system isn’t working. This came down to the fact our control room did not have visibility of our system, and we will not run service if we can’t guarantee safety. We will learn from this incident and are committed to continuous improvement. We are grateful to our partner transit agencies who were able to help our riders this morning.” 

BART does not anticipate this issue further impacting service today. Crews will continue to investigate all related equipment and if equipment replacement or repairs are necessary.

BART will be running special extended service on New Year's Eve (5am to 1am). On New Year's Day (Wednesday, Jan. 1), BART will run a Sunday schedule (8am to midnight). Find more information below. Plan your trip by visiting BART's Trip Planner or use BART's New Year's Eve extended service timetable. 

New Year's Eve 1am Extended Service

Our 1am extended service will be as follows:

• Three-line special service (Yellow, Blue and Orange only in both directions, for total of six trains for 1am extended service). Yellow Line will be the only line running in San Francisco and Peninsula. Blue Line will run between Bay Fair and Dublin/Pleasanton.
• Trains will be waiting at MacArthur and Bay Fair to complete timed transfers.
  • Yellow Line and Orange Line trains in all directions will be timed to meet at MacArthur Station at 1:47am in a "grand meet." This is the transfer point for riders coming from San Francisco heading toward Richmond or Berryessa or riders coming from the East Bay heading toward San Francisco.
  • Orange Line and Blue Line trains will be timed to meet at Bay Fair Station at 2:16am. Dublin-bound riders can take the Berryessa-bound Orange Line train and transfer at Bay Fair Station.
• SFO and OAK airport stations will NOT be served.
• Last East Bay-bound train running through downtown San Francisco will be at around 1:30am.
• Last southbound train heading toward Millbrae will run through downtown San Francisco at 2:10am.
• The regular last trains of the evening (Yellow, Blue, and Orange lines) will be dispatched from the end of their lines at midnight and then at 1:00am, we will run another set of last trains of the evening to serve 48 out of our 50 stations. The 1am trains will not serve SFO and OAK airport stations.
• Plan your trip with our Trip Planner or use BART's New Year's Eve extended service timetable. 

Parking at BART on Holidays

Parking is always free after 3pm and on weekends. Parking will also be free on New Year's Day. This applies to all BART stations except for Milpitas and Berryessa/North San Jose, as they are operated by VTA.

All other parking rules will be enforced.

Stay Safe

Save these numbers in your phone:

• 510-200-0992 to text BART Police dispatch to discreetly report criminal activity
• 510-464-7000 to call BART Police in an emergency (It’s faster than calling 911)

We also offer the BART Watch App--a free mobile app available on the App Store and Google Play that allows you to quickly and discreetly report criminal or suspicious activity directly to BART Police.

You can reach the Train Operator using call buttons in each car located by the side doors on the new trains.

Note your train car number when contacting police or the Train Operator. The train number is located above the doors on the inside of each end of the train car.

BART will have extra safety staff working on New Year’s Eve.

Early Alert Canines service dogs on BART, from left to right: Scarlett with handler Alysia Santos, Handsome Ransom with handler Kathleen Fraser, Sheldon with puppy trainer Suzie Scher.  

See our DOs and DON’Ts for pets on BART below.  

TLDR: You may only bring a pet onboard and in stations if it is secured in an enclosed carrier made for the transport of animals. Animals on leashes are prohibited with the exception of trained service dogs. Service dogs are allowed off leash if their owners are unable to hold a leash and the animal is under voice command of their owner. Please contact BART's Access and Accessibility Department for more information. 

Service animals are defined by the American Disabilities Act as any guide dog, signal dog, or other animal individually trained to work or perform tasks for an individual with a disability. Emotional support animals are not service animals and must be in a carrier when on BART. 

BART offers free BART rides for those training service animals on the system. Arrangements must be made with BART’s Customer Access Department beforehand.  

Read more about our pets on BART rules at bart.gov/pets. 

Kathleen Fraser and her service dog, Handsome Ransom, on the platform at Concord Station.  

Dogs are cute. But some dogs have jobs to do, including when they’re riding BART. 

Handsome Ransom is San Francisco resident Kathleen Fraser’s dog. He's got a big, goofy smile and soft black fur. Over that smooth coat, he wears a dark red vest with yellow embroidered text that reads: “Medical Alert Service Dog.” 

Many of us see a dog out in the world and our brains scream, CUTE CUTE CUTE, MUST PET PET PET. Ransom, like all dogs, can be distracted however, and unlike all dogs, he’s specially trained to save his handler’s life. 

“If you see me on a train, please ignore my dog,” Fraser said as a PSA to her fellow BART riders.  

Fraser has type 1 diabetes, a lifelong condition where her pancreas doesn’t make any insulin, leading to high blood sugar levels. This can lead to a series of complications, including but not limited to nerve damage, heart attack, stroke, seizures, and in the most tragic cases, death.  

In 2016 after a series of close calls, Fraser reached out to the Concord-based nonprofit Early Alert Canines in search of a service dog that would alert her when her blood sugar was dropping. The organization is one of a handful that trains medical alert dogs and connects them to people with type 1 diabetes. 

Early Alert paired Fraser with Handsome Ransom, who quickly became her best friend and most steadfast companion. Wherever Fraser goes, Handsome Ransom comes too, including on BART rides. He has to; without Ransom by her side, Fraser's blood sugar could fall, and she might not even realize it. Ransom can detect blood sugar crashes sooner than any modern medical device and often before the person recognizes the signs of an oncoming drop, such as sweating, shakiness, dizziness, anxiety, intense fatigue, etc. 

“Trained dogs pick up the scent of the chemicals your body releases when your blood sugar is dropping,” said Carol Edwards, the Executive Director of Early Alert Canines. 

“As soon as they smell those particles, they go, ‘There it is!’ and they alert their handler with a simple lift of their paw,” Edwards said. When a dog gives the alert, their handler can pause, look at the number on their glucose monitor, “and make an informed decision on what to do next before they get to that low state where one of the first things to go is cognitive ability." 

Service dog Scarlett correctly identifying a canister containing scent samples with a blood sugar level of 70mg/dL or lower at Early Alert Canines in Concord. 

The dogs are scent trained for around six weeks using a 12-arm scent wheel, with each arm ending with a small canister with a perforated lid (think spice shaker). The scent samples within are collected from individuals with type 1 diabetes experiencing a blood sugar level of 70 mg/dL or lower. Once the dogs are familiar with searching the scent wheel, they undergo a series of 500 double-blind trials. In these trials, neither the trainer nor the dog knows which canister contains the target scent. In all, the process takes around six weeks.  

Fraser said Ransom has alerted her thousands of times since they were first matched eight years ago. Sometimes, Ransom will give the alert more than a dozen times a day. 

“What I wish people would realize is that service dogs provide medical support that is just as important as a wheelchair or a white cane or hearing aid," Fraser said. "Yes, they are adorable, and yes, we all want to go up and squish them and all of that. But when they're out, they’re in work mode, and they need to be attending to their person.”  

Many don’t realize this because they just don’t know. And that’s exactly why Fraser is sharing her experiences, including some that are painful to remember.  

Fraser used to take transit to work in San Francisco all the time. But things became too challenging – and terrifying – when fellow passengers would consistently scold her for bringing a dog on transit or for using a seat reserved for disabled people in the front. Fraser often uses one of these seats as a safety measure for the dog because sitting against a wall limits the chances of someone trampling or stepping on him, thereby preventing him from doing his job. If the dog gets distracted or injured, it puts Fraser’s safety at risk. 

Handsome Ransom on BART between Kathleen Fraser’s legs in a seat against the wall.  

"There have been many times where I'm sitting in one of the reserved seats and the public, for one reason or another, starts yelling at me about ‘How dare I sit in that seat, when XYZ person should have that seat,’” she said.  

These encounters, on more than one occasion, spiraled into an “angry mob” situation, with people asking Fraser questions like: “What’s wrong with you? Why do you get to bring a dog on transit?”  

“We live in a world now where there are many ‘fake’ service dogs,” Fraser said. “People are sensitive about it in San Francisco because we have strong laws around emotional support animals and renting apartments.”  

"It's also complicated by the fact that my disability is somewhat invisible,” she added. “People say to me, ‘Well, you don’t look disabled,’ and I say, ‘What does disabled look like to you?’ Most people think ‘disabled’ refers to those with visible physical disabilities, but that’s not the case. And it’s caused me a heck of a lot of trouble.” According to multiple sources, the vast majority of disabilities are “invisible.”  

Type 1 diabetes is a protected class under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which prohibits discrimination against those with disabilities in all areas of public life, including transportation. ADA defines service animals as any guide dog, signal dog, or other animal individually trained to work or perform tasks for an individual with a disability.  

Dogs whose sole functions are to provide comfort or emotional support do not qualify as service animals under the ADA, and Fraser wants to be very clear: Ransom's job is not providing emotional support. That's an added bonus. People with diabetes are two to three times more likely to have depression than those without diabetes, and “having a dog who loves you unconditionally helps with that,” Fraser said. 

From left to right: Scarlett with handler Alysia Santos, Sheldon with handler Suzie Scher, Handsome Ransom with handler Kathleen Fraser. Pictured in the unpaid area of Concord Station. 

When you encounter a person with a service dog, there are two questions you can ask. One, is the dog a service animal required because of a disability? And two, what work or task has the animal been trained to perform? People with service dogs do not have to disclose their disability. 

Because of her traumatic experiences, Fraser no longer takes transit, instead opting to drive three miles to her office and pay for an expensive parking spot. Sometimes, that’s the way it is when you’re maneuvering around a world that is not designed with a diverse spectrum of disabilities in mind.  

"This disability is vicious, it's volatile, it's unforgiving, it's cruel, and completely unpredictable,” Fraser said of type 1 diabetes. "There is research that says people with type 1 diabetes have to make 300 additional decisions a day just to stay alive.” 

Early Alert Canines makes a point to train their dogs on public transportation because the animals’ future handlers may use it back home.  

Suzie Scher (pictured on the right with Sheldon) is a volunteer puppy raiser, and she made sure her trainee pup, Sheldon, got some experience riding the trains. She recently took BART to Downtown Berkeley Station for a visit to the Ed Roberts Campus, a universally designed, transit-oriented campus that was created by disability organizations that share a common history in the Independent Living Movement of People with Disabilities. 

“I wanted to make sure he's been on BART before he’s paired with his handler,” she said. “These dogs can be placed with people anywhere in the country – they could be riding the Chicago L or the New York subway, and they need to be prepared.”  

There are many stimulants in a transit space – the click of the fare gates, the whoosh of a train pulling into the station – and puppy raisers like Scher ensure their dogs know what they’re getting into before they’re sent off to live with their owners.

Fraser said Ransom is a “champ on BART.” On a recent visit to Concord Station, Ransom serenely followed Fraser through the fare gate, walked up the stairs, and waited on the platform beside her until they got on a train. Onboard, Fraser found a seat against the wall, and Ransom deftly maneuvered himself underneath the seat, poking his head between the protective barrier of Fraser’s legs. He sat there serenely for the entirety of the ride.  

Fraser has a few asks for her fellow passengers. As mentioned earlier, do your best to ignore Handsome Ransom – that includes not making eye contact with him. She also asks that you consider giving up your seat for her and Ransom on a crowded train.  

“When we’re standing,” she said, “we have to put the dog between our legs and make sure the tail is not stepped on. We’re doing all this while holding onto the handrail, maybe holding onto a shopping bag or purse. It’s a lot to handle.”  

It’s also important to not eat on the train and in the paid area of the station, and not just because it's against BART’s rules. Even miniscule crumbs can pull a service dog away from his task. Afterall, they’re dogs, and when they’re paying attention to food on the floor, it means they’re not working.  

“I want him to have his full attention on his person, so if their levels change, he can alert them right away,” Edwards said. “I don’t want him distracted by a piece of dropped hamburger.” 

Kathleen Fraser and Handsome Ransom walk through the fare gates at Concord Station.  

Most importantly, Fraser asks that you follow BART’s pet policy. Pets are allowed on BART, but they must be properly secured in an enclosed carrier manufactured for pet transportation. In turn, that carrier must be kept off the seats and cleared from the aisle (keep service animals off the seats and out of the aisles, too). Pets on leashes are prohibited.  

If these policies are not followed, it puts people with disabilities in danger, as well as their fellow passengers. Bringing your pet on BART without a carrier is inviting interactions with potentially life-threatening consequences, whether it’s Ransom failing to alert Fraser of a blood sugar crash or a poorly behaved dog biting a passenger. A person found to be in violation of BART’s pet policy could be issued a citation and/or ejected from the system.  

So far, Fraser hasn’t had any problems on BART, but that doesn’t mean she’s not constantly calculating what could happen when she steps on a BART train or anywhere out in public for that matter.  

“If you bring your dog on BART and it behaves badly, people remember that bad experience. Then, when I get on BART with my service dog, they take it out on me,” she said. “It makes everything harder.”  

Added Scher: “Follow the rules, and if you won’t do it for humans, do it for the service dogs." 

Service dogs reposing on the platform as they wait for a train at Concord Station.  

The DOs and DONT’s of Pets on BART 

DO bring your non-service animal on BART in an enclosed carrier made for transporting pets. This includes not just trains, but stations as well.  

DON’T put the carrier on a seat or in the aisle and keep your service animal off the seats and out of the walkways.  

DO be considerate of fellow patrons who may have allergies or fears around certain animals.  

DON’T bring a leashed pet onboard (with the exception of trained service animals). Service dogs are allowed off leash if their owners are unable to hold a leash and the animal is under voice command of their owner. 

DO remember that not all disabilities are as visible as others.  

DON’T pet a service dog, offer it a treat, or distract it in other ways. Try not to acknowledge the animal at all (we know it’s hard).  

DO be aware that Station Agents can advise owners that their service animals may not enter a station if the animal is behaving in a way that may threaten other passengers.  

DON’T forget that BART Police may issue a citation and/or eject a person from BART if they are found to be in violation of BART’s pet rules.  

DO remove all food and trash from trains and deposit it in station receptacles to ensure service animals like Ransom don’t get distracted.  

DON’T ask a person what disability they have that enables them to have a service animal. Stick to these two questions: “Is this a service animal?” and “Is this animal working for you?”  

DO consider giving up your seat to a person with a service animal to make things easier for them.  

DON’T take service dogs on escalators, which could potentially pinch their paws. We recommend using the stairs or elevators. (This is a BART recommendation; California law does allow service dogs on escalators.) 

DO be aware that service dogs in training may accompany their disabled owners or authorized trainers on BART. No service animals in training, other than dogs, are allowed on BART on leash or harness. 

DON’T bring an emotional support pet on BART unless it is in an enclosed carrier. Emotional support pets are not service animals, per the ADA.  

DO reach out to BART’s Customer Access Department, which can arrange free BART rides for those training service animals on the system.