Street Loses Good Friend : Crime: A drive-by shooting kills a 49-year-old homeless woman in Pacoima. One man calls her a ‘mother to the people’ in the neighborhood.

For the last years of her life, Bradley Avenue was home to Olivia Divers. Homeless, she lived in an old camper shell and spent her time collecting bottles and cans and hanging out with her friends at her favorite spot, a stretch of Bradley Avenue not far from the intersection of Van Nuys Boulevard.

It was there, police said, that Divers was gunned down Tuesday night--killed by a single shot to the neck fired from a passing car.

Police say she may not have been the intended victim of the drive-by; it is too early to tell. What police and Divers’ friends do know is this: About 7:15 p.m. Tuesday, the 49-year-old Divers was standing next to a wall on Bradley Avenue with several other people when a car passed and someone opened fire. Police won’t speculate on who the target might have been, but Divers’ friends say it could have been a man who was in the crowd at the time.

The killing has shaken those who knew Divers, and left them mourning her passing.

“Even the most violent gang members, black and Latino, would stop by and give her money all the time,” said Frank Witt, a friend who regularly sat along a brick wall and drank with Divers and other friends.

“She was a mother to the people in this neighborhood,” Witt said.

On Wednesday, Divers’ friends placed a single blue ribbon and a few bouquets of flowers picked from a nearby yard along the wall, a memorial to Divers and an unofficial notice to residents that the woman they saw every day for years was gone.

“Oh, don’t tell me,” said Ray Santillian, a nearby resident as he stepped from his Chevy Blazer and walked toward Witt. He stopped when he saw the memorial and the chalk circles in the street where police found shell casings.

“It makes you feel so bad, because people have such little value for life anymore, and they always seem to shoot the wrong ones,” he said.

Friends said Divers lived in a rickety camper shell that sat near an alley that runs parallel to Van Nuys Boulevard. They said she swept the streets and sidewalks and kept the area clean. Children in the neighborhood brought their empty bottles and cans to her.

Those who knew her say Divers wasn’t always homeless, and until the early 1980s held a steady job, attended church and lived with her sister on Gains Street in Pacoima.

Azalee Hodge, a member of the Mount Gilead Baptist Church where the sisters attended, said Divers’ life took a turn for the worse when her sister drowned in a freak accident in June, 1987.

After the drowning, Hodge said Divers stopped coming to church, where she sang in the choir, and quit her job as a cafeteria worker at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Misson Hills.

For a time, Divers befriended and lived with Rodessier Lattin, another church member who lived not far from her old house on Garber Street in Pacoima. From her current home in Arizona, Lattin said Divers helped care for her--she suffered from chronic asthma--and for her grandson, who had leukemia.

“Everyone liked Olivia, but you could not keep her out of the streets, she just loved it,” Lattin said.

After Divers moved out, Lattin would occasionally spot her on the street, bring her back to her Garber Street home, clean her up, give her a meal and buy her shoes when she “caught her barefoot.” But she could never convince Divers to abandon her tough street life.

“She once told me, ‘I bet I’ll die in the streets,’ ” Lattin recalled. “She said her dad and sister back in Alabama died the same way. They would just get them some drinks and stay out in those streets.”