Been Down So Long Jail Looked Like Up to Him : Homeless: San Diego man’s slide started when work ran out. He says he robbed a bank to come in from cold.

On a cold and rainy day a few weeks ago, Vernon Lamarr Clark robbed a bank. He said he did it so he could go to jail, get fed and stay warm and dry. He said he could not think of any other way to get help.

Since work ran out two years ago, things have just gone to hell. After awhile, the unemployment checks stopped coming. His wife kicked him out. He was living on the streets, pushing a shopping cart and digging through dumpsters, sleeping in cars abandoned in back alleys. He saw his four children infrequently. And he started drinking.

Without family to take him in, without a high school education to boost his chances of getting a decent paying job, without the sort of safety net the policy planners talk about, Clark, 51, had become the homeless person he said he used to laugh at when he was welding steel into buildings and bridges, an ironworker with a trade that sustained him and buoyed his pride. All gone--in two years.

Clark’s slide underscores the grim realities that increasingly affect Americans caught in a bewildering economic downturn. It also illustrates the staggering human cost--the family breakups, the erosion of personal dignity--behind the faceless financial numbers. From a street-level perspective, it points up the limited options facing a poorly educated man out of work.

And it points up a sad truth. When the rest of America’s institutions could offer nothing to Clark, it was left to the justice system to figure out what to do with him--and for taxpayers to pick up the bill.

On Oct. 25, the cold began to bite and it started to rain. Clark and law enforcement authorities agree on what happened next.

Fortified by three 40-ounce bottles of Olde English “800” malt liquor, Clark walked into a Union Bank branch in San Diego’s City Heights neighborhood, thrust a wet brown paper sack at a teller and presented a note that asked for $40 or $50.

Clark said he had a gun, but in reality he did not, according to an FBI report of the robbery filed in San Diego federal court. The teller, who looked scared, gave him $40, Clark said.

“I put on the note that I had a gun,” Clark said in a recent interview. “When I handed it to the lady, I seen her eyes light up and she started, like, shaking, you know. I said, ‘Please, I didn’t come here to harm you. Just give me $40 or $50. And I’m going to walk outside the bank and wait for the police to come arrest me.’ ”

To expedite his arrest, Clark motioned to the bank security guard, walked outside with him and told him to call police, the FBI said.

“I just sort of did it,” Clark said. “I need help. I needed somewhere to stay. It’s getting cold out there. It’s starting to rain. I don’t want to be out there in the rain, sleeping in cars, half eating. I just did it. I don’t know exactly.

“I just need help.”

The federal government answered Clark’s cry--it put him in a jail cell in downtown San Diego and charged him with bank robbery. If convicted, he could be sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Though he freely admitted his guilt in an interview, he entered a plea of not guilty. Clark’s case has been set for trial Jan. 14 before U.S. District Judge Gordon Thompson Jr.

Assistant U.S. Atty. John B. Scherling, the prosecutor on the case, declined to comment.

Clark’s lawyer, Nancy Kendall, a deputy federal public defender, asked in an interview, “What does this say about our government and our society that the man feels like the only thing he can do is commit a crime so he can get the help nobody will give him?”

San Diego Municipal Judge Robert Coates, who wrote a book last year called “A Street Is Not a Home: Solving America’s Homeless Dilemma,” said Clark’s story was far too familiar.

“As the economy turns down, people lose their jobs,” Coates said. “When people lose their jobs, they get depressed and the people around them get teed off. Substance abuse goes up. As that happens, their effectiveness goes down. And pretty soon, they’re under a bridge somewhere.”

Stressing that he was not commenting on Clark’s guilt or innocence, Coates said that Clark’s circumstances were “not exactly a Horatio Alger story.

“But it’s not at all out of the ordinary. It’s a story that has a similarity to hundreds of thousands of people’s stories around this country.”

Clark is no angel. The idea of turning to crime to solve his problems is not a new one, though what he says he did this time was a new approach. Twice before, he has been to jail.

He did 2 1/2 years in San Quentin and Folsom prisons for a Los Angeles burglary, leaving Folsom in 1972, he said. In 1983, according to San Diego court records, he was convicted of assault with a deadly weapon. He said he tried to shoot a neighbor who had threatened his family.

For that, Clark was sentenced to a year in San Diego County Jail and five years probation. He served about six months and was released early for good behavior, records indicate.

Sitting in a green plastic chair at the federal downtown Metropolitan Correctional Center in San Diego, the chair so low his knees stuck up into his chest, Clark insisted in a recent interview that he is not a criminal.

“When I got out of the penitentiary in 1972, I did everything I could to stay out of trouble,” he said. “I could have been in trouble millions of times since then. But I was working, I was content, I was happy, I had a family.

“I had everything a man could want in life,” Clark said. “It seemed like I lost it all in one day. Well, not in one day but, you know, the past two years.”

Clark grew up between San Diego and Los Angeles. Upon leaving Folsom, he came to San Diego for good at the bidding of two uncles in the construction business, who got him started learning the ironworking trade, he said. He joined the union in 1973 and married in 1975.

There was the six-month interruption in 1983, but by all accounts, Clark worked steadily for years and had straightened out his life--until unemployment threw him a curve.

The business manager of Ironworkers Union Local 229 in Clairemont Mesa, Fritz Umscheid, said he has known Clark for years, calling him a “very likable person and a very good ironworker.”

When Clark was in trouble in 1983, a previous business manager at Local 229, Vince Ryan, wrote a letter urging leniency, saying that Clark “had proven to be an honest, dependable man who is an asset to our trade.” In an interview, Umscheid said Clark was “nothing exceptional, but (he was) a good, steady worker at one time.”

There just has not been steady work for Clark, or hundreds of others in the union, Umscheid said. Of the 730 active union members, about 40% are unemployed, Umscheid said.

“It’s horrible,” Umscheid added. “I’ve been here 26 years. And this is the worst I’ve ever seen.”

When work slowed, Clark collected unemployment until the money ran out. Bored, he began to drink, preferably potent malt liquor, he said. His wife, Mattie, 37, told him he had to stop. They fought, and two years ago she turned him out. They remain married--16 years now--but separated.

“Lamarr, he’s a good person, a strong person, but I felt if I wasn’t there for him to depend on, he could do something for himself,” Mattie Clark said. “But I guess it didn’t work, because it’s all (fallen) apart.”

When work was steady, Vernon Lamarr Clark said, he took home $20,000 or more a year. Most days during the past two years, Clark said, he scrounged for aluminum cans, sometimes making $15 or $20 a day, sometimes not.

“I started pushing shopping carts up and down the alleys, digging in dumps, (making) just enough to exist on,” he said. “It was kind of humiliating and embarrassing, you know. I used to laugh at people doing that. Now I found myself in that position.”

Clark acknowledges that there were work options he could have explored--but did not.

“I could have probably took a job at Jack in the Box or McDonald’s or something, you know, because I have no other skills, I don’t know anything, I don’t have a high school education,” Clark said. He finished the 11th grade, he said.

“But I don’t think I could do it,” Clark said. “They don’t pay enough. Minimum wages--a man my age can’t even live on what they’re paying. I can’t live on no $4.25 an hour.”

So he took stock of what he considered his other options.

“I said, ‘Well, I could go out there and sell drugs.’ But I don’t want to sell drugs. I don’t want to get involved in that,” he said. “Then I said, ‘I could go out there and rob a grocery store and get me a place to stay.’ I said, ‘No, I don’t want to do that. I might get shot.’ ”

One day, he said, he saw a crowd of homeless people sprawled out on sheets of cardboard behind a welfare office in southeast San Diego.

“I didn’t want to end up like that,” he said. “So I just started thinking, ‘What can I do? How can I get some help?’ One day, I was about half-drunk, I said, ‘Write a note and go rob a bank. Maybe you’ll get some help.’ ”

On Oct. 25 he wrote a note and robbed a bank. He said he regrets it.

“I really was sorry when I seen that lady shaking in the bank and the note said I had a gun and I knew I didn’t and her eyes just lit up and she started shaking,” he said. “That really hurt the most.”

If he is convicted, he said, “I have to accept that. I made the mistake.”

On the other hand, Clark already is in group therapy in jail. And he has not had a drink since the day he walked into the bank, he said.

“I’m not bitching,” he said. “At least I’m getting three squares a day. I wasn’t getting that on the streets. I got a roof over my head now. I didn’t have that on the streets.

“This is not the way I want to be,” Clark said. “But I know I need help.”