Skid Row Peacekeeper Fights His Last Battle

Harry Rodgers stood out from the mass of homeless people on Skid Row.

He volunteered time to a downtown Los Angeles legal clinic and other local groups and helped organize the tent city that sheltered street people across from City Hall during the Christmas season last year.

While the tent city was up, the tall, stocky 32-year-old was there 24 hours a day, moving among the cots and keeping the peace among all the troubled people who sought shelter.

But the man who was known on the streets as someone who stopped fights got into one Tuesday and ended up dead, his throat slashed.

“Anger such as this is always very close to the surface,” said Jeff Dietrich, a volunteer with the Los Angeles Catholic Worker downtown and a witness to the altercation that led to Rodgers’ death.

Rodgers was in line at the Catholic Worker’s Hospitality Kitchen, a downtown soup kitchen, waiting for lima bean stew, bread and water, when a dispute arose between a friend of Rodgers’ and another man, Orlando Wright, who was later taken into custody.

“The victim (Rodgers) decided to interject himself into the altercation,” Los Angeles Police Detective John Durkin said, “and advanced . . . with a shovel. The victim struck with the shovel, and the suspect slashed at him with a knife.”

Rodgers was pronounced dead at County-USC Medical Center.

Wright, 50, injured in the hand, was hospitalized overnight at the County-USC Medical Center jail ward where he was booked for investigation of murder. He will remain in custody at County Jail pending submission of the case to the district attorney, Durkin said.

‘Very Political’

At the Hospitality Kitchen at 6th Street and Gladys Avenue on Wednesday, a line of about 200 men snaked around the facility. Several people there remembered Rodgers as “very political” and very “strong”--the kind who watched out for the weaker ones among the street people and took them under his wing.

He would sometimes walk up and down the soup line handing out flyers he had written, outlining what people’s rights were in obtaining welfare grants, recalled Meg Baum, a Catholic Worker volunteer who was on duty at the kitchen Wednesday.

When a fight broke out on the line recently and Baum was beaten when she tried to stop it, only Rodgers interceded, Baum said. “He came over,” she said, “stepped in front of me and told the guy to back off, saying, ‘We don’t need this kind of behavior down here.’ ”

Though authorities could not confirm it, friends said Rodgers was born in Los Angeles, was once married (his wife died) and had a family in South-Central Los Angeles from whom he was “very removed.” They also said he had spent time in prison, but police would not confirm it.

Voracious Reader

He was a voracious reader, always with a book or newspaper.

“When you talked to him, you’d be interrupting his reading,” said John Malapede, an advocate at the Inner City Legal Center, where Rodgers sometimes helped interview clients.

Recently, Baum said, the Los Angeles Philharmonic had donated some tickets, and Rodgers had gone with her to a concert at the Hollywood Bowl. He read the newspaper all the way out in the bus, she recalled.

When they arrived at the bowl, they found the donated tickets were “nice seats,” Baum said. “All these people were sitting in boxes, drinking white wine. Harry kept looking around and wondering who they were, where they had come from and what they were thinking.”

Between April and June this spring, Rodgers had worked for Single Room Occupancy Inc., a group rehabilitating Skid Row hotels. Dolores Carlos, a woman whose boyfriend worked with the homeless, said that while Rodgers had the job, he stayed at her home to save money.

Dreamed of an Apartment

“Some people dream of having a house of their own,” she said. “Harry dreamed of getting a little apartment.”

But the job didn’t last, and Rodgers went back to the street.

Not far from the soup kitchen is a sidewalk area where Rodgers most recently lived. A jumble of chairs, boxes, cooking utensils and foam mattresses, it is what remains of Justiceville, the homeless settlement dispersed by police last spring.

The night before he died, friends said, Rodgers’ shoes had been stolen there as he slept.