Restaurant Owned by Foe of Homeless Rammed

A homeless woman, using her van as a battering ram on Monday, demolished the front of a Venice restaurant owned by one of the leading critics of the community’s growing transient population.

Los Angeles police said that Penny Benjamin, 48, destroyed the veranda of the Land’s End Restaurant at 323 Ocean Front Walk when she repeatedly crashed her cream-colored, 1965 van into the deserted dining spot shortly before 1 p.m.

Bruce Stanley, the manager, was in his second floor office when the crash occurred. Stanley said it sounded like gunfire was hitting the restaurant. “I heard the loudest bang you could imagine,” Stanley said. “When I looked out I saw the van moving along the walk, just ramming us over and over.”

Onlookers said Benjamin, a longtime resident of the beachfront parking lot that faces Land’s End, bore into the stylish restaurant as many as 10 times before she wheeled around and calmly returned to her regular parking space. Police arrested Benjamin at the scene, booked her on suspicion of felony vandalism and held her overnight.

‘Mad at Owner’

“She said that she was mad at the owner of the restaurant,” Sgt. Kevin Kurzhals said. “Officers ordered her out of the van and she was arrested.”

Friends said that Benjamin has lived in her van for nearly two years. They said that the homeless woman had recently become extremely despondent over the breakup of a relationship.

“She was in very bad shape,” said Jennifer Pirie, who heads a homeless group called Venice Neighbor to Neighbor. “This was not a calculated act.”

But Land’s End owner Pierre Denerome, who has complained frequently about the homeless who descended on Venice in droves last summer, said he was not sure. Denerome, who has denounced the transients at a series of recent public meetings as “drug abusers, mental patients and plain old bums,” said friends on the beach had warned him that Benjamin was making threats.

Will Try to Stay Open

“I heard that she had spoken about doing this,” Denerome remarked as he inspected the crushed remains of his green and white veranda and awning, which sustained about $20,000 to $30,000 worth of damage in the incident.

Denerome, who blames the homeless camped on the sand in front of his restaurant for cutting his business by as much as 50%, said that he will try to keep the business open. He said that he was not surprised by the attack since emotions are running so high over transients in the community.

Another act of violence involving the homeless occurred last week when Thomas J. Wasserberg, identified as a transient, was shot in the area of the spleen while foraging for food in an alley near the beachfront. There have also been bombing threats made against the St. Joseph Center, a homeless aid group.

Los Angeles City Councilwoman Ruth Galanter, who represents the area, said she was saddened by the latest act of violence. The councilwoman said tension is running “unacceptably high” throughout the community.

Concerned About Safety

Galanter has been trying to calm emotions by calling for increased social service support and appointing a special task force to raise money to support transients who are looking for jobs. Galanter said she remains concerned about the safety of Venice residents and homeless people.

There were signs, however, that Monday’s beachfront episode had only aggravated the problem. Sam Joseph, who owns a beachfront restaurant near Denerome’s, said businessmen are nervous about the possibility of further violence.

“We have been threatened before,” Joseph said. “We just try not to take the threats seriously.”

Bill Mitchell, who lives on the beach, said the homeless are equally concerned about mounting community pressure and increased law enforcement activity on the beach. “It seems like class warfare down here,” he said.

Officials say that Venice has one of the largest concentrations of homeless people in Los Angeles County, with their numbers reaching as high as 2,000. The beachfront homeless population has declined recently, but experts say that transients continue to congregate in other parts of the small community.