Residents More Wary of Squatters in the Hillsides

Without money, without work, without a place to stay, they stray into the hills rimming Los Angeles--the forgotten homeless.

No one tabulates their numbers. No one serves them soup. Like members of a lost generation, they occupy the one sun-drenched corner of America where rugged, brush-covered hillsides lie hard against the sprawl of a teeming metropolis. The very hills that frame Los Angeles with hints of glamour and rustic tranquillity are thus the hiding places of transients who scour for food, who live in cardboard lean-tos and who, every so often, touch off fires.

In the rugged canyons of La Crescenta, about 20 miles from the soup kitchens of Skid Row, homeowner Bill Ferril sees them and stops them, wondering where they are from, why they are there.

“They’re usually out of money--construction workers, roofers, people in between jobs,” Ferril said. “They just come up here and camp out. . . . Some have girlfriends. It seems there has been more and more of them, and they are staying longer.”

Like many homeowners, Ferril fears the fire danger that the transients represent. That threat became all the more real after one of the homeless--a 35-year-old Chinese refugee encamped in rugged Eaton Canyon--said he was warming himself this week on a dawn campfire that touched off one of the region’s most calamitous brush fires: a 5,000-acre blaze that destroyed 118 homes in the foothills of Altadena.

Even as that transient, Andres Z. Huang, was arraigned Friday on charges of unlawful use of fire, homeowners throughout the San Gabriel and Santa Monica mountains kept a worried lookout for the thin columns of smoke that betray other homeless encampments.

“It’s always a worry,” said Altadena resident Gary Jaegers, who coordinates a volunteer citizens group known as Arson Watch, composed of about 20 ham radio operators who provide tips to Los Angeles County fire and sheriff’s departments. It is common knowledge that transients stay at times in the remote areas of Eaton Canyon, Jaegers said.

“There are people up there and it is a problem,” he said. “They do have campfires, that sort of thing.”

In the brush-covered hills north of Lake Avenue, some homeowners used to regard the squatters as being harmless. But now that those hillsides are charred, residents are far more fearful.

“It never occurred to me (that) transients could start a big fire,” said Patsy Leishman, 50, a homemaker who gathered with other neighbors Friday on front lawns singed by the blaze. Though her house was spared, she is going to be “much more wary now” of the squatters, Leishman said.

“Before, I saw transients and I took them for granted,” said Donna Pinto, 47, who manages an apartment building in the same neighborhood. “Now I think, ‘Can they be some sort of potential danger?’ ”

In Thousand Oaks, a hilly Ventura County community where a 35,000-acre brush fire was still burning Friday, a similar fear had taken hold. Over and over in recent days, citizens have called the police to report squatters who were perceived as fire threats. In some cases, those transients were merely people known to have started campfires in the past. One fearful homeowner even reported a homeless person who had done nothing more than light up a cigarette near her home, Thousand Oaks Police Department Sgt. Terry Hughes said.

“We recognize the problem won’t go away by just making them move,” Hughes said, noting that police often have little means of allaying the concerns. If anything, the homeless population in the hills has soared in recent years, just as it has in inner-city streets, according to homeless assistance groups, who conduct no organized assistance efforts for the squatters in the brushland.

Usually, they are single men who disdain the harsh competitiveness of living on the streets. Often, they set up cardboard boxes or live under trees as protection against wind or rain.

Alladin Premji, the owner of a Rent-a-Wreck outlet in Thousand Oaks, constantly worries about the squatters living on the hillside abutting his business. At times, he sees half a dozen of them trek past his shop carrying cheap wine.

Last November, one woman had a baby at the encampment, he said.

“It’s a big concern,” Premji said. “They cook with fires. I see them carry the groceries up the hill.”

In June, the Fire Department rushed to the site twice in one week to put out small fires that had begun spreading, he said. The city rousted out the squatters, but they came right back, Premji said.

Ferril, 58, a former businessman who is regarded as the eyes and ears of his tiny upscale community near La Crescenta’s Pickens Canyon, said the homeless tend to gravitate there because a stream flows through it year-round. Some months ago, Ferril reported seeing smoke and a sheriff’s helicopter ordered the fire put out.

But the campers were not arrested, in part because law enforcement officers cannot reach the rugged terrain by car--and it takes an hour to hike to the remote interior, Ferril said.

“On (several) occasions we’ve had minor incidents of these people starting small fires up here over the years,” Ferril said. “We’ve also had burglaries that people think are caused by these (transients) in the area. Strange things disappear out of refrigerators and garages, like dog food.”

Ferril recalled brush fires as far back as 1964 and 1975 that were attributed to campfires. He also remembered other bizarre observations: how the campers seem to come and go at dawn or dusk, as if in secret; how some of the neighborhood boys found a severed human head down in Pickens Canyon a few years back; how a dead body turned up in the same area, maybe 10 years ago.

Some hillside residents insist they never see homeless campers, nor fear them. But others note that the squatters have been around for many years.

One of the more noted was Burt the Hermit, who lived for a long while in a cave near Big Tujunga Road in the Angeles National Forest, according to Adrian Hensley, who runs a family-owned campground concession for the U.S. Forest Service.

“He even had something rigged up so you couldn’t see smoke from any of the fires,” Hensley said, noting that the shield may have also kept sparks from setting off brush fires.

Burt, who was considered eccentric, avoided human interaction at all costs. But when he died a few years ago, Hensley said, Forest Service rangers and her own father-in-law found his cave stockpiled with an enormous number of books, most of them filled with scientific data.

Another transient in the national forest lived under a California 2 bridge crossing a steep ravine, Hensley said. That man, who appeared one day without explanation, made the underside of the bridge his home for years--and then disappeared just as mysteriously.

“Nobody ever knew what may have happened to him,” she said. “And that would be the case with most of these people.”

* RELATED FIRE STORIES: A4-A10, B1, D1