Harmless, Homeless Man Had Friends--and an Enemy

Joel Danford made it a point most mornings to run across busy South Main Street and grab a quick snack at the small grocery store that faces the Santa Ana gun shop where he works.

The 22-year-old gun salesman also made it a point to drop spare change in the weathered palm of a homeless man who lived in a nearby field.

“Yesterday I gave him a dollar,” Danford said Tuesday morning. “I felt sorry for him.”

On Tuesday morning, the partially clothed body of the homeless man, identified by friends and a former employer as Dan Hammack, was found with stab wounds in the parking lot of the Main Street Market at 2133 S. Main St. in Santa Ana, police said.

Hammack, who for several months had lived off the occasional graces of local merchants and who sometimes bothered them with bizarre behavior, apparently was killed overnight while sleeping under a tree next to the grocery store’s parking lot, according to accounts by police and witnesses.

A homeless friend found Hammock’s body at 6:30 a.m., witnesses said. The victim was wearing only underwear, police spokeswoman Maureen Thomas said. His pants and shoes were missing and a shirt believed to be his was lying next to the blood-covered body. He carried no identification, she said, but police estimated his age to be in the mid-30s.

“It was homicide,” Thomas said.

Police declined to confirm the victim’s identity. “At this time we don’t know who he is,” Thomas said.

But Dell Beason, who runs a small, temporary-employment agency that gave Hammack occasional work, said the man was Hammack, a 6-foot-2 drifter with shaggy brown hair and a beard.

“It was definitely him,” said Beason, who had heard about the slaying from the network of homeless men who work for him. He added that Hammack had listed the Salvation Army Hospitality Center on 3rd Street as his address.

Beason said Hammock sometimes worked as a day laborer, but friends said he had often bragged that he was once a successful carpenter in Nevada.

Merchants working in the block of shops surrounding the open field said Hammack had become a landmark, a familiar face, and sometimes a problem.

“He wasn’t all there,” said Sharon Oddo, owner of Sharon’s House of Carpets, a small shop that faces the open field. “He was crazy, but I felt bad for him.”

Oddo, who occasionally had to yell at Hammack when he slept next to her store, said it was not surprising that he was found without his pants.

“He used to take his clothes off all the time,” Oddo said. “We tried to get the police to take him somewhere, but they told us they couldn’t.”

Danford, who watched police cordon the area with yellow tape Tuesday, said Hammack “sometimes he acted like a maniac, but he was OK.”

Police detectives found no weapons or other sign of a struggle, and they have no suspects, Thomas said.

Hammack’s friends, who had gathered Tuesday afternoon in the market parking lot to mourn his death and sip tall cans of beer, said it was not of necessity that Hammack lived under the tree.

Body Found in Morning

“He chose to live in the outdoors,” said Dennis Miltonberger, who sleeps in a battered Ford Escort in the parking lot. “He never even hurt a fly. He never tried to cause no trouble.”

Miltonberger said he discovered his friend’s body in the morning when he drove into the U-shaped parking lot to meet Hammack. He found Hammack lying lifeless in a corner of the lot, amid a pile of litter and leaves.

He said Hammack had been stabbed so many times that the body was almost unrecognizable.

“He was mangled,” Miltonberger said. “I didn’t see him moving. All I saw was a lot of blood.”

The sight, Miltonberger said, will “stay with me. It’s really sad because this is the first time in a long time I didn’t stay here” at the parking lot overnight.

“You leave for one night and look what happens,” he muttered, shaking his head. “This really hurts me.”

Hammack’s friends said they were shaken and angry.

“The reason this happened was because this guy was homeless,” Miltonberger said. “Why else would he be killed? He didn’t even have a quarter.

“Why would anybody want to kill someone for nothing?”