More details have emerged in the mysterious killing of a San Francisco teenager three years ago, as a judge is about to decide if the accused killer should be tried as an adult.
On one side, you have the parents of a neurodivergent teenager who grew up in San Francisco who say that their son, always yearning to find friends, followed a classmate to a remote, abandoned warehouse in Hunters Point that was well known to graffiti taggers on the promise of a party, and ended up brutally bludgeoned to death — with the killer tagging the wall near where the body lay, adding a spray-painted arrow pointing to it.
On the other side, you have the parents of the accused killer, who say that their son was in recovery for drug addiction and, perhaps because of an underdeveloped brain due his adolescent drug use — and his age, 17 years and five months at the time of the crime — sought revenge or vigilante justice against a peer who, possibly according to a girl he was dating, had tried to assault her, or whom he talked about sexually assaulting.
Max Maltzman was 18 years old and newly living on his own in a Tenderloin apartment when he went missing in January 2023. A student at Raoul Wallenberg High School, Maltzman was last seen at his apartment building on January 6, 2023, and his body would then turn up three weeks later, submerged in water and under a steel plate in the basement of that Hunters Point warehouse…