A San Francisco judge is expected to rule this week on whether the young man accused of luring 18-year-old Max Maltzman to an abandoned Hunters Point warehouse and bludgeoning him to death should be tried as an adult — a decision that would make him the first minor sent to adult court in the city in more than a decade.

The transfer hearing before Judge Anne Costin has drawn attention for its gruesome facts: a graffiti tag left as a signature, a 911 call that captured the victim's final screams, a nearly two-year gap before an arrest. But the ruling matters beyond this one case. Since California voters passed Proposition 57 in 2016 and stripped prosecutors of the power to file juvenile cases directly in adult court, San Francisco has tried to move only five minors across that line — and, by the county's own records, has failed every time. Maltzman's case is the fifth attempt, and the furthest any has advanced.

Maltzman, a senior at Raoul Wallenberg High School who was diagnosed with autism and had recently moved into his own Tenderloin apartment, vanished on Jan. 6, 2023. That night, a 911 dispatcher answered a call and heard screams, thumps and a single cry of "Help!" before the line went dead, the San Francisco Chronicle reported (external source, opens in a new tab). Officers sent to the former Hunters Point Naval Shipyard found nothing and left. Seventeen days later, someone exploring graffiti inside a concrete warehouse discovered his bludgeoned body, floating in a flooded shaft beneath a steel plate — a spray-painted arrow and the tag "EBOK" marking the wall above it.

Prosecutors say that tag led them to a classmate who attended Maltzman's funeral, then left for college before his arrest 20 months later. The Chronicle, which is not naming the defendant because he was 17 years and five months old at the time, refers to him as "Aaron." Now 21, he sat quietly in a suit and glasses as attorneys spent weeks arguing not whether he killed Maltzman, but where he should be tried.

That distinction is the whole case. A transfer hearing sets aside guilt and asks a narrower question: can the defendant be rehabilitated in the time the juvenile system has left? If he stays in juvenile court, he must be released before he turns 25. If his case moves to adult court and ends in a murder conviction of the highest degree, the exposure jumps to a possible term of 25 years to life.

District Attorney Brooke Jenkins is pushing for the transfer, arguing, alongside Maltzman's parents, that the defendant has shown no remorse and cannot be reformed on a juvenile timeline. It is a posture consistent with the office's stated policy of seeking adult charges only in "heinous" crimes — murder among them — and with Jenkins's broader move, reported by Mission Local in 2025 (external source, opens in a new tab), toward trying more juveniles as adults.

The defense counters that this was no calculated act. Attorney Adam Gasner argued the crime was unsophisticated and called a forensic psychologist who testified the defendant was chasing "short-term rewards" out of a "warped sense of justice," according to an account in SFist — a reference to a claim, unsubstantiated in the proceedings, that Maltzman had threatened a girl the defendant knew. Maltzman's parents flatly reject that account. "He wanted to be a normal kid in a normal environment," his mother, Jennifer Gosselin, told the Chronicle.

The numbers explain why the ruling is being watched. Statewide, transfers have collapsed under Prop 57: from 136 hearings in 2015, when judges sent roughly half of defendants to adult court, to 23 hearings and 10 transfers in 2025, the Chronicle reported, citing state data. In San Francisco, all four prior transfer attempts of the past decade failed. Judge Costin's decision will determine whether the fifth breaks that streak — and whether one of the city's most disturbing killings becomes the case that ends a de facto local moratorium on trying children as adults.