Help the Homeless Survive: Sunday Bee Article and Comment

Faces of fear

Attacks on the homeless are common across the nation,

and Sacramento's street people also tell of beatings

By Jocelyn Wiener -- Bee Staff Writer
Email: jwiener@sacbee.com

Published 2:15 am PST Sunday, January 22, 2006
Story appeared in Metro section, Page B1

They attacked him in the dark hours of last Sunday morning, while much of the city slept.

John Jewett, 53 years old and homeless, had hidden himself in a shed on a loading dock near the fancy new midtown Safeway. The young men, three by Jewett's count, arrived around 3 a.m. While one held him down, he said, another hit him repeatedly in the face with a metal pipe. Across the country that same day, two teenagers in Fort Lauderdale turned themselves in in connection with the beatings of several homeless men, one of whom died from his injuries. Their images had been caught on a surveillance camera. The images of Jewett's attackers are seared only in his mind.

The incidents weren't connected, except in relation to a disturbing pathology. Some young men find sport in assaulting the homeless.

From 1999 to 2004, the National Coalition for the Homeless documented 386 attacks on homeless people in 140 cities.

At least 156 homeless people have died from beatings, stabbings or burnings often meted out by strangers. Countless others have been injured. Experts say the assailants tend to be young men.

In Sacramento, 48-year-old Vinia Thomas said she was left bloodied after being shot with BB guns and kicked in the head last summer. Fred Finley, 50, said he awoke a few years back to see a grapefruit whizzing toward his face as he slept on church steps.

Jewett emerged from this latest attack with 14 stitches, facial cuts and a bruised jaw. A long thin scar creases his nose from an attack he says the same men carried out a month earlier.

On that occasion, he said, the men beat him with a pipe and a tree branch, splitting his nostril, scratching his cornea, then fleeing as he stumbled, bleeding, down the street. He finally collapsed near a register inside the Safeway, he said.

Jewett and other homeless victims who survive such attacks are left nursing their injuries and puzzling over one hard-to-answer question: Why?

What spurs a group of young men - in Fort Lauderdale or Denver or Seattle or Sacramento - to attack those without the protection of a roof and four walls, many of them suffering from some form of disability or mental illness?

Everyone has a hypothesis.

John Jewett's is this: "These guys have the mentality that homeless people aren't really anybody, you can kill them and nobody will miss them."

Other homeless people guess their attackers must need to blow off steam, or entertain themselves, or that they buy into societal myths that portray the homeless as lazy, burdensome and "other."

Mark Zoulas, a Sacramento police officer who works closely with the homeless, said he believes the attackers must make themselves feel powerful by preying on the weak. "It's, I guess, the same people who torture small animals," he said.

Television exacerbates the problem, said Garren Bratcher, co-director of Friendship Park at the Loaves & Fishes homeless services complex in Sacramento. A series of videos pitting homeless people against one another in brutal fights have become popular among some young people in the past five years. The videos, called Bumfights, are sold at discounted prices on barnesandnoble.com and amazon.com. Last summer, a couple of young men in Los Angeles watched one of the videos, then headed out to slam the homeless with baseball bats.

"It gives them an idea," Bratcher said. "I think the desire's already there."

Many of these theories have some truth to them, said Thomas Greening, a professor of psychology at Saybrook Graduate School in San Francisco. Greening says attackers are desperate to differentiate themselves from those they perceive as weak, and that assaults are a way of shoring up their fragile self-esteem. They might even feel they're performing a public service by harming the homeless, he said.

"I desperately need to prove I am a macho, aggressive guy," is Greening's assessment of that mentality.


He said society reinforces such behavior by classifying the homeless as inferior beings who are not worth helping.

Bratcher said he has seen an increase in attacks on the city's homeless in the past year - he now hears about an average of one or two a week. Sometimes people wield dangerous weapons. Sometimes they shoot paintballs. Sometimes they yell nasty comments as they speed by in SUVs or pickup trucks.

That's how it began for Jewett - with comments. Jewett, a former taxi driver, said for years he had lived in a comfortable one-bedroom apartment just blocks from the storage shed where he was assaulted. A clean-shaven man, with hazel eyes now circled with bruises, he said he became homeless a little more than a year ago but tries his best to blend in.

The young men started harassing him during the summer. They'd bang on the shed, throw rocks and bottles and yell, " 'We're going to set the place on fire! It'd be real fun to see you coming out screaming,' " Jewett said.

He stayed because the shed was a "primo location." It had no heat and no light and no bathroom, he said, but there was a mattress to sleep on and the roof protected him from the rain.

Then, one night in December, Jewett said, the young men lured him outside.

"Come on out, man," he said they told him, just before the assault that split his nostril. "We just want to talk."

Bratcher said the attacks are becoming "almost like a sport." He estimates that 90 percent of incidents never get reported. Many people are afraid of going to the police, or assume the perpetrators will never be caught.

Brian Williams, for one, said he never reported the attack against him and his brother. A few months ago, the two were sleeping on the same block where Jewett was assaulted. He said a few guys walked by, sprayed soap on him and yelled, "This is a no-bum zone! Get the hell out of here!" Then the men started hitting them with sticks. "

I wasn't bothering nobody," said Williams, 48. He said he was afraid to talk to the police about it, though, and didn't think reporting it would accomplish anything.

Vinia Thomas did report an attack last summer. In that case, Thomas woke up after several men got out of a van and started shooting pellet guns and kicking her in the head.

But three weeks ago, after a few young men in a gold car pulled up alongside her and started shooting BBs at her, she said she didn't bother to report it. Nothing had happened to the last people who assaulted her, she said.

She often feels like the police blame her for her situation if she complains.

"We get tired of being yelled at," she said. She dug the pellet out of her hand by herself.

Most of those who sleep on the streets have their own mechanisms for staying safe.

Steve Auringer, 51, said he always sleeps with a group for protection, and monitors the comings and goings of strangers. Fred Finley sleeps in groups, too, preferably under streetlights or near well-traveled roads where the police are apt to roll by. And of course, most everyone agrees the best way to protect themselves is to get inside housing.

"I'm an indoor person," 45-year-old Tom Anderson said, with a nervous chuckle. Those homeless individuals who are most vulnerable - whether because of mental illness, age, or physical disability - are also the most often targeted.

Helen Baggarly, 48 years old, deaf and homeless, said she routinely gets robbed on the first of the month, after she receives her disability check. Baggarly is nonverbal, and signs and writes to communicate. She says in this way that she's had her money stolen seven times. The other day, her eyes teared as she summed up her experience on paper:

"YELL LOUD CRY SAD BAD FEEL HURT MONEY STOLEN GONE."

Laura Chase, the Sacramento police detective working on Jewett's case, is determined to find his attackers - and "pretty confident" that she will. After the first attack, Jewett tried to help her. He left the shelter where he was staying and returned to his hideout in the shed. He said he kept an eye out for the men who had harrassed and attacked him and notified police when he saw them. But they always got away. Then, early last Sunday, the men came back. "This is the snitch," he said one of them yelled. They smashed the cell phone on which he was attempting to dial the police. While one man held him down, he said, another beat him in the head. He remained composed in his recounting of the incident, until he began to describe the way he felt as the pipe smashed against his face. At that point, he buried his head in his arms and started weeping. "I practically begged him to stop," he whispered.

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ROBERT POLLARD, 49, homeless: He says he has been targeted occasionally by men throwing eggs from their cars as they drive by.

HELEN BAGGARLY, 48, homeless: She says she has been robbed of her disability money seven times by people who approach her from behind. Baggarly can't hear them coming because she is deaf.

VINIA THOMAS, 48, homeless: She says she has been the victim of BB gun attacks, one while she was sleeping near Loaves & Fishes, another while she was walking with a friend around 12th and North B streets. She says she's given up on reporting the attacks to police.



See images @ Websource: http://www.sacbee.com/content/news/story/14103118p-14932885c.html

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About the writer: The Bee's Jocelyn Wiener can be reached at (916) 321-1967 or jwiener@sacbee.com

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