A San Francisco jury has convicted a 41-year-old man of domestic violence charges stemming from an attack in which prosecutors say he burned a woman’s head with a torch lighter inside a Sunnyside hotel room and kicked her in the mouth as she tried to pack up and leave. Michael Thomas Coleman was found guilty following a jury trial on charges including assault and inflicting injury resulting in a traumatic condition.
According to prosecutors, as reported by KRON4, Coleman and the victim had been staying together in a room at the Sunnyside Hotel on August 10 when a hotel manager asked whether the two would be staying or leaving. Prosecutors said that as the victim began gathering her belongings, Coleman burned her head with a torch lighter and kicked her in the mouth. Jurors returned their guilty verdict Monday.
Prosecutors Point to Survivor’s Courage
San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins said domestic violence often happens behind closed doors, and that no one should have to suffer in silence. She commended the survivor’s courage and strength, adding that her office remains committed to protecting survivors and holding domestic-violence offenders accountable, per the same KRON4 account.
Assistant District Attorney Ahmanda Lee, who is also named in the case, said what happened to the victim should not be met with silence and that the harm inflicted on her cannot be undone, the station’s report notes. Jenkins and Lee’s comments came as part of the office’s announcement following the conviction.
A Pattern Playing Out Statewide
The Sunnyside case lands amid a broader statewide picture of domestic violence that researchers describe as increasingly weapon-involved. California law enforcement agencies fielded roughly 163,000 domestic-violence calls for assistance in 2024, and 61% of those calls reported the use of a weapon, according to the California Policy Lab. That weapon-reporting figure has climbed 44% over the past decade, the same report found.
Separately, the Public Policy Institute of California found that California agencies received more than 160,000 domestic-violence-related calls in 2023 alone, equivalent to 18 calls every hour. The institute also reported that more than half of 2023 incidents involved aggravated domestic assaults, up from 35% in 2019, while the share of incidents involving objects rose from 6% in 2013 to 12.5% in 2023.
Convictions Have Fallen Even as Arrests Hold Steady
Despite the rise in reported severity, statewide domestic-violence convictions actually declined 29% between 2015 and 2023, with about 6,600 fewer convictions in 2023 than in 2015, the California Policy Lab reported. Arrests, by comparison, dipped only slightly over roughly the same period, falling about 2% by 2024 compared with 2015 — a gap of around 2,600 arrests across nearly 1.3 million total between 2015 and 2024. The Policy Lab also found that about nine in ten people convicted of domestic violence in California over that span were male.
San Francisco’s own numbers show a county that has historically recorded a relatively high rate of domestic-violence calls — averaging 406 per 100,000 residents annually from 2015 through 2024 — alongside about 46 convictions per 100,000 residents each year over a similar period, per the California Policy Lab’s data. A separate analysis from the San Francisco Public Press previously found the city had the lowest per-capita domestic-violence prosecution rate among Bay Area counties, at 29.5 charged cases per 10,000 residents, compared with a Bay Area-wide rate at which charges were filed in 45% of cases. That older data does not establish how current 2026 outcomes in San Francisco compare.
Torch Lighters Have Surfaced in Other Attacks
Coleman’s case is not the only recent instance of a torch lighter being used as a weapon in an alleged assault. In Pennsylvania, Shippensburg police arrested a man, Dion Magaro, on suspicion of holding a woman against her will and burning her with a butane torch lighter, according to PennLive. And in Seattle, police said they arrested a 24-year-old man after he allegedly threatened to burn a 60-year-old woman with a torch lighter inside a residence known as Evan’s House, according to the Seattle Police Department Blotter.
