Vapor Room dispensary owner Martin Olive was shot seven times in Monday night’s SoMa melee that led to a police stand-off and the fatal shooting of his alleged assailant, but a few accounts from his friends say Olive is speaking and “in good spirits.”

After Monday night’s police shooting at Ninth and Mission streets, where SFPD officers shot and killed a still-unidentified alleged assailant, we started to get word that the police shooting came after that assailant had shot the owner of the Vapor Room dispensary, Martin Olive. The shooting happened right in front of Vapor Room’s SoMa location, and initial reports said that Olive had been hospitalized with “life-threatening injuries.”


But not much more than 36 hours after that shooting, Broke-Ass Stuart reports that Olive is recovering well and already speaking again. That outlet reports that someone posted an Instagram video of the hospitalized Olive saying, “Hey guys, thanks for the concern. Looks like I survived yet another near death experience. We’ll see what happens. Love you all very much.”

(The earlier “near death experience” described refers to Olive’s 2012 brain aneurysm that required brain surgery.)

There is also a GoFundMe for Martin Olive’s recovery that has raised more than $82,000 in barely over a day, and has more updates and encouraging news. “It turns out he was shot seven times, and some bullet fragments are too risky to remove. He'll likely be in the hospital for another week or longer, facing immense costs,” that campaign’s organizer Jason Tyler Grace writes. “Despite severe injuries—wounds on his face and earlobe, swelling, stitched up all over, and blood drainage—he remains in good spirits, even earning a reputation as the hospital's most popular patient.”

You may recall that the Vapor Room dates back to an original Lower Haight location in 2004, back in the old “medical marijuana” days, and was the first dispensary of that era to have a smoking lounge. That location of the Vapor Room was forced to close in 2012 amidst a federal crackdown on dispensaries before the recreational cannabis era, and Olive was not able to reopen the Vapor Room at the new Ninth and Mission streets location until 2019.

View on Threads

Parenthetically, another footnote to Martin Olive’s list of accomplishments is the above viral Threads post from last November, which somehow merited a writeup in Newsweek.  

Related: One Killed In Officer-Involved Shooting In SoMa That Followed Different Shooting [SFist]

Image via GoFundMe