The Crime of Having Nowhere to Go

When I met Paul Kwasniowski one morning this week, he was hosing down a dog at a friend’s pet grooming shop inhabited by so many animals that it resembled the set of an Ace Ventura movie. As we sit and talk, each with a cat on our lap, Kwasniowski rages at the system.

No justice, he says. Killers, rapists and drug dealers run free, while a guy like him gets nailed on a small-potatoes charge. “It’s ridiculous,” he says.

He tells me his story: “OK, I was in Mission Viejo on Charlinda. The street dead-ends into a cul-de-sac. It was about 11:30 at night, and I was kinda tired, so I fell asleep in the back of my truck. They always tell you, if you’re tired, pull off the side of the road. All of a sudden, I heard someone knocking on the window, and it’s an Orange County sheriff’s deputy and he asked me what I was doing. I said I was tired.”

This is the point in the story to note that Kwasniowski, 42 years old and a stout 230 pounds, has no permanent residence. Most nights, he says, he pays six bucks to sleep in the O’Neill Regional Park in Trabuco Canyon. On the night in question, which was May 18, he pulled over on Charlinda and was sleeping in his camper shell when deputies approached. “The deputy says, ‘You can’t sleep in your truck in Mission Viejo,’ ” Kwasniowski says. “He ran my license for any warrants. Of course, they didn’t have any, because I never get in trouble. He comes back and gives me a ticket for unauthorized camping. What could I say, I just signed the ticket.”

A few weeks later, Kwasniowski went to South County Municipal Court, expecting the fine of around $300 to be cut in half. Judge Wendy Lindley didn’t fine him at all. Instead, she gave him three years’ probation, stipulating that his guilty plea could be expunged if he stayed out of trouble and refrained from sleeping on the street.

Why, he asks, should he have to be on such a social leash just for falling asleep in his truck. So we sit and talk and he vents his anger at the judge, saying she should be fired and that he’s communicated his protests to Sheriff Brad Gates, Gov. Pete Wilson and President Clinton.

There’s a story in Kwasniowski’s plight, something that makes me want to give voice to him. Then, from another corner of my mind, something wants to silence that voice.

What’s wrong, I ask myself, with dozing in your camper-truck on a dead-end street, even if a residential complex is nearby? People sleep in their cars at highway rest stops; why can’t you pull off the road in Mission Viejo and snooze?

Having said that, how would I react to a stranger sleeping in his truck on my block? Perhaps I shouldn’t mind; I think I would.

Judge Lindley tells me she thought she was lenient with Kwasniowski. Deputies had previous contacts with him, which he concedes, and that convinced her it was time to do something about him. The judge says she has compassion for homeless people, but she also recognizes that they can become troublesome fixtures.

For that reason, she says she’s almost sure she referred Kwasniowski to a homeless shelter. Kwasniowski says he doesn’t need or want that kind of help. I phoned the shelter, which is in Laguna Beach, and office manager Shazeen Mufti says the 29-bed facility--the only one in South Orange County for single adults--has a two- to four-week waiting list. No, she says to my question, Mission Viejo doesn’t have a homeless shelter.

I ask Mufti about the Paul Kwasniowskis of the world. “It does speak to something in our society,” she says. “If he’s not creating a problem on the street or panhandling or disturbing the peace, I might just talk to him [instead of citing him] . . . If I were driving, let’s say, to San Diego and I got tired and slept in a parking lot for an hour, would that be wrong? But if this happened in my neighborhood, it would be a cause of some concern for me. You don’t know what someone’s background is. As a citizen, I would probably contact the police. Where it goes from there is more of a system problem.”

With shelters woefully ill-equipped to handle the homeless population, you have to ask where people like Kwasniowski are supposed to sleep. “What did I do that’s so wrong?” Kwasniowski says. “I got a worse sentence than [some] drug dealers.”

Three years’ probation--even one where he doesn’t have to report to an official--seems steep, but I can’t bring myself to condemn the judge. I interpret her sentence as nothing more than saying to Kwasniowski: Stay out of Mission Viejo.

Is there any doubt that’s what the citizens of Mission Viejo would have wanted her to do?

So, Kwasniowski fumes at the judge, but his anger is misdirected. His antagonist is not a muni court judge but a society that doesn’t have a place for a guy who can’t quite get it together but who is otherwise relatively harmless.

Kwasniowski scares us. He scares us, and so we shoo him away, not knowing if he’ll ever get help but at least comforted in knowing that he’s not going to be hanging around our block.

Perhaps not a rational fear, but neither is it illegitimate.

With Kwasniowski off our block, asleep in his truck or not, we feel better.

He is left to rage against a judge, against a society much more powerful than he.

Whether he knows it or not, he’s raging against the wind.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at the Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com