Isolated Rail Lines Lure Homeless : Shelter: A weekend shooting in Winnetka and a vacant Canoga Park store’s population of transients shows the growing use of sites near tracks as refuges.

Rod Van-Zeller wasn’t shocked to hear that the two transients who were shot Sunday in south Winnetka after breaking into a home had been living along nearby railroad tracks.

One of the men was killed, the other seriously wounded.

Van-Zeller, whose Canoga Park auto repair shop sits next to the Southern Pacific railroad tracks, said he sees more transients than trains along the tracks.

A vacant hardware store that had once been a train depot, in fact, has become something of a hotel for transients who cut through chain-link fences and break windows to gain access to the structure.

“One time, I think we counted 20 guys going in there,” Van-Zeller said.

The south Winnetka shooting and “homeless hotel” in Canoga Park give evidence to the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of homeless who take refuge daily along the hundreds of miles of isolated and seldom patrolled tracks that traverse the county like stitches on a quilt.

For years, the responsibility for those tracks, and the transients who take refuge there, had been primarily on the shoulders of railroad companies who owned the rights of way.

But that responsibility has gradually shifted in recent years to county transportation agencies who are purchasing rights of way to expand the region’s new mass transit rail system.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Southern California Regional Rail Authority now own 215 miles of rights of way in Los Angeles County--138 miles of which are used for the Metrolink commuter service.

Since the Metrolink service began in October, 1992, Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies hired to patrol the rights of way have arrested 819 adults and issued citations to 380 juveniles for trespassing on the tracks, said Sheriff’s Lt. Mike Glugman.

He said a significant number of the adult arrests were transients who live along the tracks.

“Encampments are springing up constantly,” he said.

Roberta Tinajero, a MTA spokeswoman, said MTA and the regional rail authority that operates Metrolink spend nearly $500,000 annually to keep the tracks clean of trash and weeds.

“Those are the measures we have to keep the tracks from becoming homeless camps,” she said. “In light of our recent budget deficit, we are doing what we can do.”

Southern Pacific Transportation Co., which still owns nearly 1,000 miles of rights of way and 4,600 parcels of property in Southern California, has seen a noticeable drop in complaints about transients and trespassers since it began to sell off rights of way to county transit officials, said railroad spokeswoman Carolyn Borne.

Nonetheless, the rail company continues to routinely field complaints about transients.

Homeless advocates say transients take refuge on rights of way because there is a severe shortage of homeless shelters in Los Angeles County, and they rebut charges that transients are responsible for crime in nearby neighborhoods.

“Homeless people are easy targets to blame because they are most visible,” said Bob Erlenbusch, executive director of the nonprofit Los Angeles Coalition to End Homelessness.

He said a study of crimes committed during a recent one-year period in Santa Monica showed that only 12% of the crimes were committed by homeless people.

Furthermore, he said studies have shown that Los Angeles County provides shelter for only 9,000 of the 43,000 to 77,000 people who are homeless on any given night. “It’s not hard to figure out why you have people living outside,” he said.

Erlenbusch said he believes that the homeless chose to live in rights of way, under bridges and in riverbeds because such sites provide privacy and shelter.

But property owners along railroad rights of way say the tracks are not a place for setting up private shelters.

Don Schultz, president of the Van Nuys Homeowners Assn., said the problem of transients living or using rights of way to pass through has been ongoing for years.

Only last weekend, a Van Nuys resident whose home abuts the tracks on Blucher Avenue complained to Schultz about transients hanging around an area of right-of-way that is overgrown with dry weeds. The resident was worried that the transients would smoke and accidentally set fire to the weeds, and possibly a nearby home, he said.

Al Denney, leader of the South Winnetka Neighborhood Watch Group, said he has been complaining about transients along the tracks for more than a year but has received little response from transportation officials who own the tracks.

Taking matters into their own hands, Denney and other neighbors took it upon themselves Saturday to clear the rights of way of brush, sleeping bags, clothes and food. They also planted bougainvillea in hopes that the prickly bush would discourage transients from sleeping along the tracks.

But when the two transients returned to their hovel Sunday, they became upset that their few belongings had been disturbed. In search of their possessions, the men entered the adjacent home of Raymond John Komoorian, police said. Komoorian, who was armed with a .45-caliber pistol when he found the men in his bedroom, fired as the men lunged at him, police said.

One man, Jose Aleman Menjivar, 47, was killed. The second, identified as Ismael Rodriguez, 42, remains in serious condition with bullet wounds to the chest. Rodriguez was charged with attempted grand theft and residential burglary.

Van-Zeller and other property owners along tracks in Canoga Park said there are rarely violent encounters with transients. Mostly, they leave trash. Occasionally, they commit petty crimes, such as stealing car batteries.

In a tour of the vacant hardware store in Canoga Park, Van-Zeller and fellow business owner Bob Bartels pointed out trash, broken bottles and strewn blankets that gave evidence to the regular occupancy of the building.

They said they have urged Southern Pacific, which owns the building, to tear it down. “The less places these guys have to go to, the less problems,” said Van-Zeller.

Borne said Southern Pacific is in the process of selling the building to a local historical society that wants to convert it to a museum. Until the sale is finalized, she said, the building is in limbo.

While showing the inside of the building to a visitor, Van-Zeller and Bartels came upon Miguel Perez, a homeless man who had arranged a makeshift bed along the building wall with carpet padding and blankets. Nearby he had several buckets of water, which he used to wash himself and to clean the fruit and stale meat he said he found in nearby dumpsters.

In an upstairs room, they discovered a half-dressed woman asleep on a cushion of blankets. The woman, who identified herself as Sherry Tucker, 33, said she and her husband Boney where told by a man who leases an adjacent lot that they could stay in the building as long as they keep other transients out.

After being awakened by the visitors, Tucker dressed and gave the men a tour of the building.

She said she was once a nurse’s aide but was stabbed in a fight and now lives off of disability payments and her husband’s salary as a construction worker. Tucker said she has five children who all live with her mother.

She said most of the transients she sees in the building are not criminals. But she said being homeless makes some people desperate.

“It’s not that bad,” she said. “but you have to be strong.”