For those of you who expressed an interest in helping Richard, I have the relevant info.

If you wish to send money, here’s the deal:

You can send cash by either calling Western Union (1-800-325-6000) or going to WesternUnion.com. Then the money should be sent for RICHARD LOCICERO to a Western Union outlet in Costa Mesa called:

Cash Stop
1934 Harbor Boulevard
Costa Mesa, CA 92780
Phone: (949) 548-3551

Unfortunately, it turns out that wiring money in the US is way more complicated than it should be so, if you send something, Richard has to be notified, plus he’s supposed to have some kind of code thingy (that Western Union will give) you called the MTCN number.

So you can do one of two things. You can call the Cash Stop and talk to a very nice woman named Colleen who will walk you through this, and facilitate Richard filling out the necessary paperwork in order to actually receive the cash.

….OR…

You can email me with the MTCN number and the amount, and I will email Richard, who can then go to the Cash Stop armed with this info.

(Those of you who already have Richard’s email can cut out the middlewoman by doing this directly.)

I have no freaking idea why this process is so complicated. I’ve wired money to Mexico on various occasions and had to jump through no such hoops. (As to why I’ve wired cash money to Mexico….don’t ask. Let’s just say my reporting life has many….um….interesting facets.)

Anyway, there you have it. Richard is very ambivalent about receiving help, but I’ve suggested he should get over it. We all need help, from time to time.

However, he mentioned that his real wish is to be able to work in exchange for somewhere safe to stay. Giving his present medical condition he’s not a good candidate for, like, say, the job of triathlon coach or operating a fork lift. But he’s a wickedly smart researcher and writer, and could probably do most things that involve sitting in front of a computer.

So please think creatively, my dears.

Tourist states with temperate climates, such as California and Florida, have long been magnets for the homeless. Los Angeles is the nation’s homelessness capital, with an estimated 73,000 people on the streets. A survey of 3,230 homeless people last year in Los Angeles County found nearly 7 percent living in vehicles, according to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.

“It’s trending toward an increase,” said Michael Stoop, acting executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless. “People would rather live in a vehicle than wind up in a shelter, and you can’t stay on a friend’s couch forever.”

The above clip is from an article that ran in Briebart on Monday. It described how an increasing number of people in Los Angeles are living out of their cars—like Richard. Except that he used to be living out of his car, but the thing has since broken down. Now he’s dependent on shelters and the Motel 6, the latter only when he has the money.

Also, Richard doesn’t live in LA but in Orange County, where, according to this year’s County of Orange Community Indicators Report, there are 30,000 homeless who need a place to sleep each night, but there are less than 900 emergency shelter beds in the entire county.

It is deeply disturbing to realize that our social safety nets are so porous that someone as intellectually vigorous and productive as Richard could so easily fall through them. Yet, along with the undeniably harrowing details of his circumstances there is also the fact that he has been able to accomplish quite a lot given his situation. Not only was Richard commenting on my blog and Marc’s, he was also one of three regular co-hosts over at Randy Paul’s blog, Beautiful Horizons, where he wrote smart, newsy, opinionated posts sometimes several times a day with seeming ease—like these from last June.

As I mentioned yesterday, I asked Richard to write a little about his present situation,—which he said he was finding difficult to do now that his health was more tenuous. Yet a week later he sent me a first installment:

My name is Richard. I’m 61 years old. I’m part of a growing army of homeless people here in Orange County who are neither mentally ill— at least at the start— or chemically dependent on alcohol or drugs. How I got here is the story I’m going to try to tell. Up front, let me say it will be hard. I’ve never been very good at talking about myself and the idea of opening up about this is difficult.

While my family has Sicilian and Italian roots, my mother was brought up with all the Yankee values that one could expect of the Connecticut home where she was raised.

My father was the first in his family to go to college and but, when he graduated in 1931, found a degree in French Literature was not a key to fame and fortune. So he found what work he could and raised a family. My brother was born in 1932. I followed fourteen years later.

I grew up in Norwalk, a working class neighborhood of Los Angeles. We had a nice house – VA and FHA financed, of course.. The depression made my father risk-averse. I think he would have made a great teacher but he didn’t think of going back to school on the GI Bill. Neither did he join with friends in business opportunities that might have paid off handsomely. Instead, he stayed with the security of the post Office. But he always found time to instruct me in the Great World outside. Weekends were spent at all the museums, ports, and other diversions of Los Angeles. He was a great instructor.

That is all I have the energy for right now. But before I go on I’d like to say a word or two about “Homelessness” and what it means. What does it mean to you for example? Probably the image of a dirty drunken or crazy middle aged man comes to mind. Well that is one view and its not wrong. But it’s not completely right either.

Yes we are dirty and we smell. There are few showers on the street and even fewer bathrooms. And when you wear the same clothes day after day – the scent of Irish Spring is not yours. After a bit we stop noticing the smell, but we know that you do. It is one of the things that serves as a barrier to social intercourse. We know people are turned off from us and we draw away.

About the alcohol and drugs: Sure, that’s how many ended up on the street. But not all. A surprising number are working men in their fifties rendered redundant by this economy.

A lot can also be said about the shameful dumping that occurred in the sixties when we closed the big mental institutions but failed to create the half-way houses needed to bridge the gap. Living on the street is stress-inducing anyway – if you’re not clinically depressed, you likely have far more serious mental or emotional problems.

And, yet I see a lot of people like me, with disabilities—maybe work related —that are not addressed in any adequate way.

It took me three days to finish this much so I’ll sign off. More soon.

But before I go, let me say this. I made choices. Many of them turned out to be bad.

Some of you have kindly expressed the desire to help Richard. Later today, I should have some information as to where you can send money, should you wish. I’ll post it as soon as I get it.

*********************************************************************************************

PART III on Monday

(The photo, which is not of Richard, came from the LA Homeless Blog.)

Richard had been a regular commenter at WitnessLA since the site’s inception in March of 2007. (I’ll call him only by his first name here as his last name is for him to reveal. Regular readers will easily solve the riddle.) He migrated to WLA from my good pal Marc Cooper’s blog, where he’d been an intelligent and impassioned commenter for several years.

In the course of the ongoing online public conversation I—we-–learned that in the past Richard had taught English—or maybe it was English composition—at the University of Southern California. We also learned he was very well-educated and that he seemed to have an impressive amount of knowledge of the law, so much so that whenever I would post about some particularly vexing legal issue, several commenters would usually call for Richard to weigh in.

As with other online communities, the world of blogs has opened up an unusual kind of fellowship. After months and sometimes years of digital exchange—-ranging in nature from the usual fractious political colloquy to days-long discussions about which strange Christmas recordings might belong on this year’s ultimate top-ten holiday song list—-we come to know people, or we believe we do, without ever having laid eyes on them or having heard the sound of their voices. We also come to care about those with whom we share these electronic meeting halls, our new-fangled public squares.

And so it was with Richard.

As blog mistress I get to look behind the wizard’s curtain. In so doing, I noticed that Richard lived in Orange County and that he posted from the Newport Beach Public Library. Knowing him to be ultraliterate, I wondered if he was working as a librarian. A couple of times, Richard disappeared for a week or two, and when he returned he briefly mentioned some health problems. But, he always turned up eventually and would comment with the same intellectual vigor.

In May, he disappeared again. When weeks and weeks went by without a sign of Richard or his comments, some of the other WLA regulars began to worry. I did too. Politically, Richard leans to the left. But even the conservative posters, like Woody, a commenter/sometimes blogger who had fought with Richard for years, at both my blog and Marc’s, expressed real concern. Several people had his email address and tried to reach him. But there was no reply.

I finally sent out my own shrilly anxious email to the address I could capture from his posts.

A few days later, Richard answered. Here is what he wrote:

Thanks for the concern. I think it’s time to come clean and explain why I’ve been off line for a time.

First of all I’ve spent three weeks in hospital with complications from heart failure and diabetes. The later has affected my leg while the former required the implantation of a pacemaker. The rest of the treatments included antibiotics for the infected leg – caused by lymphedema (a swelling related to diabetes which leaks out lymphatic fluid and gets infected).

I should also tell you I am homeless.

Now let me tell you how I got into this state. The fact is for the past two years I’ve been living on SSI—$870 a month —which doesn’t pay for much. I used to share a place, but the person moved so I moved into my car with occasional stops at local motels. But now my car is kaput and till I can cajole something from someone I’m on the street. At least Costa Mesa has decent weather and it’s not raining. Social workers are trying to help but since I’m so sick and only have SSI the assisted living places won’t take me. My guess is I’ll bounce back to the hospital before long. Well a lot of this is my doing I suppose but I noted after fifty, it was very hard to find work and now I couldn’t work even if I wanted to.

Stunned that someone whom I felt to be so incredibly bright, good-hearted, accomplished and likable, at least the online Richard I knew, could find himself in such dire circumstances, I asked Richard if he would write a little bit more about his situation and that, if he was willing, I would post it. He said he would endeavor to do so.

Right now I use the facilities at the OC Public Library (Newport Beach Library isn’t on a bus line so its hard to get to) and time is limited to an hour a day at each branch. My main concern now is some stable housing plus meals. Believe it or not its hard to even get to soup kitchens when a block’s walk is like running the marathon. Right now I’m at the first stage of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs—you know, survival. But I’ll try to write more soon.

Maybe Father Boyle could use an English instructor!

Yours in faith

Richard

PART II tomorrow

Gera and Tin Tin….writing.

Last year, my novelist friend, Leslie Schwartz, and I managed to rope ourselves into heading up an unusual endeavor called the Homeboy Stories Project. It wasn’t a totally fly-by-night idea. The project was sponsored of PEN USA (where I’m on the board of directors, and she’s the president) and Homeboy Industries, and was funded primarily by a grant from the California Council for the Humanities as part of their “California Stories Initiative.”

Our intention was to gather together some young, at-risk gang wannabes plus some older former gang members—drawing primarily from the group that worked with and/or hung around at Homeboy Industries. It was our hope to teach them that their voices were worth something. We figured we’d do this by introducing them to the art of creative writing during a 14-week class, in the course of which we would also help the youngsters collect the veteranos’ “oral histories” on digital recorders. Our plan was to then transform all of the above into a snazzy printed anthology that would be presented in several public readings/receptions, with the homeboys and homegirls doing the reading. One event would be on the east side of town. The other on the west side.

Well, we have the anthology, and I can honestly say it’s a wonderful document. The east side reading is this coming Saturday night, July 14, 6:30 pm at Utah Street Elementary School. The second reading is next Wednesday, July 18, 6:30 pm at Crossroads High School. [details below the jump]

But, other than those three facts, very little else went as planned.

For one thing, class attendance was sometimes disrupted by the fact that several of our writers got beat up, arrested and, in one case, shot.

Read the rest of this entry »

As commenter, Richard Locicero brought up in the last thread, the notion of execution—lethal injection or no lethal injection—becomes even dicier when viewed in the light of the growing number of exonerations.

Because of my gang reporting, I know of a smattering of cases in which people are serving time for crimes they didn’t commit. (And, of course, I also know of a number of other situations where people didn’t get caught for crimes they did commit.)

There is, however, one instance in particular that continues to haunt me.

I’ll get to that in a minute, but first some more recent news:

On Monday of this week, the 200th person exonerated through the use of DNA evidence was officially cleared . His name is Jerry Miller and he spent 25 years in prison for a Chicago rape, which he didn’t commit.

Here’s what the AP said about the case:

The details of the latest exoneration are typically nightmarish: Jerry Miller served 25 years for a rape conviction and had already been paroled when DNA tests showed he could not have been the man who attacked a woman in a Chicago parking garage.

Yet more alarming even than the individual stories, is the fact that the number of newly discovered wrongful convictions in the United States is growing at an increasingly rapid clip.

What’s also troubling is how common these exonerations have become since the first reversal in 1989. It took 13 years to reach the first 100 DNA exonerations, but just five to double that number. For prosecutors and judges, as well as defense attorneys, the exonerations raise a larger question: How many others, innocent of their crimes, are behind bars?

Advocates for extensive changes in the way cases are investigated and prosecuted see the 200 as the tip of a huge iceberg and use the word “epidemic.”

Prosecutors bristle at the characterization. They agree that a single person wrongly convicted is an injustice that can’t be tolerated, but see the problems as few, far between and fixable.

Well, maybe. While “epidemic” is a bit extreme, there is a growing uneasiness among many working in and around the criminal justice world who suspect that, as forensic technology becomes more sophisticated, and more and more states begin forming “innocence commissions” to examine claims of wrongful convictions, it’s likely that exoneration numbers are going to increase substantially

In California alone, more than 200 people have been cleared of major crimes—rape, murder and the like—using DNA but also other methods—as it many cases there is no DNA evidence.

The truth is, it doesn’t take a major crime for a false conviction to have a near-ruinous effect on someone’s life.

Read the rest of this entry »

In this section, we plan to run a series of multi-part narratives, tales told chapter by chapter over weeks or months (and, in certain cases, as they actually unfold in real time). The idea is to better humanize the complexities of certain social issues by viewing them through the lens of those whose lives those issues most affect. For instance, we’ll look at the issue of homelessness through the point of view of an unusual street worker, an impassioned police officer, an activist service provider, an artist, and a man who is trying, thus far without success, to get off Skid Row and into a place of his own.

But, even before we get to the series on homelessness, we’ll be introducing another terrific and sometimes painful story about public education in urban America. It’s called The Principal.

Part One will appear later this week.