Oakland Vietnamese Restaurant Rammed by Vehicle Three Times

Tay Ho, a Vietnamese restaurant that’s been feeding Oakland’s Chinatown neighborhood for 15 years, was targeted by a brazen burglary attempt this week when a suspect used a vehicle to ram the front entrance three times.

The attack didn’t work. The suspect got nothing, but left behind serious damage to the restaurant’s facade. Tay Ho shared images of the aftermath on Facebook, showing what repeated vehicle strikes look like when aimed at a place that’s spent a decade and a half building a loyal following in one of Oakland’s most culturally rooted neighborhoods. Not a small thing.

The incident is the kind of crime that lands differently in Oakland Chinatown, a district that has spent years organizing around safety concerns and anti-Asian violence. A restaurant surviving three ramming attempts only to wake up to a wrecked entrance captures exactly how exhausting it’s been for small business owners in the area.

Meanwhile, about 100 protesters marched from Powell Street to Civic Center in San Francisco on Wednesday evening, demonstrating against what they described as Trump’s war with Iran. The march was orderly, and the crowd moved through the downtown corridor with signs and chants before gathering near City Hall. It was one of several demonstrations in the Bay Area this week tied to U.S. foreign policy.

San Jose had its own chaotic night to report. Around 100 minors were detained Friday after they allegedly broke into the shuttered Burbank Theater and were found inside, partying with alcohol. Police responded to the closed venue and detained the group. The Burbank Theater has been out of operation, and whoever organized that particular Friday night had to know sneaking a hundred teenagers into a shuttered building was unlikely to end quietly.

In Santa Clara, a burglary case got significantly bigger this week. Police had arrested Francis Robinson earlier, believing he was connected to the break-ins of 35 storage units back in February. That number has since grown. Investigators now believe Robinson was involved in approximately 75 burglaries across multiple Bay Area cities. Storage unit burglaries tend to run in patterns across jurisdictions, and this one apparently stretched well beyond Santa Clara’s borders.

San Francisco is closing three public health clinics in the coming months, a direct result of the city’s ongoing budget crunch. Two of the clinics serve youth in the Tenderloin and the Haight, neighborhoods where the need for accessible, low-barrier health services is not abstract. It’s daily. The closures follow months of difficult budget conversations at City Hall, and advocates for low-income youth have been sounding alarms about exactly this kind of service loss for a while now. The city’s Department of Public Health has not publicly detailed what alternative services will be available once the clinics shut their doors.

Still, the political news cycle had its own texture on Wednesday. Democratic politicians have apparently started leaning into profanity on social media, with the New York Times noting the trend around language directed at the Trump administration. Whether that’s strategy or catharsis probably depends on the politician.

The federal case getting the most attention Thursday morning involves Courtney Williams, a 40-year-old woman who worked in a support role for the Special Operations unit Delta Force at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. Federal prosecutors have charged her with leaking classified information to a journalist. According to the charges, what she passed along were accounts of sexual harassment and gender discrimination inside the Army. It’s a case that puts two serious legal and ethical questions in direct conflict: the government’s interest in protecting classified material, and a person’s decision to expose what she says was misconduct against women in one of the military’s most elite units. Whistleblower cases involving military personnel have a complicated history in federal courts, and this one is unlikely to be straightforward.

The week’s stories, taken together, sketch a Bay Area Thursday that’s noisy and uneven. A Vietnamese restaurant ramming in Oakland. Protesters in the streets downtown. A hundred teenagers in a shuttered theater. A storage unit suspect whose alleged crime spree turned out to be twice as large as anyone thought.

Much of the above was first flagged in the morning roundup from SFist, which remains a reliable first look at what’s moving across the region each day.

The Tay Ho story, though, is the one that sticks. Three times. The suspect hit that building three times and still walked away empty-handed. Fifteen years in Oakland Chinatown apparently builds something harder to knock down than just a front door.