A Chill Has Set in After Killings of 3 Homeless

The onset of winter brings added hardship for the homeless. Tempers flare in the scramble for the few available beds in shelters or desirable spots on the street. But this season is shaping up as particularly frightening after three homeless men were killed recently in Orange County.

“I don’t even remember the last time one homeless person was murdered,” said Santa Ana Police Sgt. Raul Luna.

In that city, Alex Francisco Rangel, 40, and Wayne Randall Gilbert, 52, were recently killed. Rangel was found dead Oct. 7, the day after his birthday, underneath his billboard abode along 1st Street.

Six weeks earlier, Gilbert was found shot to death in an empty lot that he had made his home along 17th Street.

Both were killed at night. No suspects or motives have been identified in either case.

The killings, rare in themselves, led detectives to investigate a possible connection. None has been found, Luna said.

In Costa Mesa, a homeless man known in the streets simply as “Old Man Dave” was bludgeoned to death Nov. 9 as he slept behind a row of shrubs in a Harbor Boulevard strip mall.

David Fredrick Yacovetta, 47, was found with his head crushed. Another homeless man, Jerry Patrick Keating, 39, was arrested and charged with his death. Police have found no motive, said Costa Mesa Police Lt. Ron Smith. The day Yacovetta’s body was found, another homeless man was killed in south Los Angeles, apparently after trying to break up a domestic dispute.

“Word got around fast,” said David Carlson, 49, a homeless friend of Yacovetta, who crouched behind a trash bin and sipped from a bottle of beer. “We knew it was the Old Man pretty fast. I was very sorry to hear he lost his . . . life, beaten to death like that.”

Among Orange County’s 18,000-and-growing homeless population--a diverse group that includes working families struggling to reverse their fortunes and mentally ill nomads--homicide is one of those rare occurrences that reinforces how dangerous living on the streets can be.

Even for men like Ronald Jones, long exposed to the hazards of the street, the cold nights can be fraught with countless terrors.

When the weather turns frigid, people worry the homeless lack shelter, blankets, hot food. But what the homeless worry about most are the random acts of violence, assaults and even murders, Jones said.

“I was a five-star general in Satan’s army,” Jones, 54, said. “But at night, when it gets dark and cold, once your eyes are closed, anybody can do anything to you. You’re scared as hell.”

Jim, 65, a nattily dressed former insurance salesman, said sometimes a person has to fall back on vices just to relax enough to sleep in the street.

“Cigarettes are a big thing because you’re a nervous wreck,” Jim said. He’s been assaulted several times by young toughs and other homeless men, he said.

Riding a bicycle--a prized possession among the homeless--in Santa Ana, trim-looking Joseph Preciose, 31, said living on the streets is simply unnatural. And the longer a person is on the streets, he said, the more warped one becomes.

“You grow up with the family morals, and the school teaches you things,” Preciose said. “But if you ever end up on the street, you’re overwhelmed. Everything goes out the door.”

Often, he rides his bike to a church near his mother’s Placentia home. He climbs the stairwells to the roof and falls asleep.

“Where else would you feel safe?” Preciose said. “If you can’t feel safe on the roof of a church, where else?”

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Southern California’s homeless population cannot be stereotyped, said Karen Roper, Orange County’s homeless coordinator.

There are homeless in the urban cores of Anaheim, Orange and Santa Ana, but also in San Clemente, Laguna Beach and San Juan Capistrano.

There are families living in their cars and in motels, struggling to climb out of financial holes. There are day laborers who work on construction projects in the county but find the local real estate far beyond their reach.

There are professionals who caught a bad break or slipped into addiction and there are mentally ill loners.

People’s perception of the homeless bothers Dean Clayton, 49, a Vietnam War veteran living on the streets of Orange. Particularly bothersome to him is the belief the homeless are stupid.

“I got an Orange County library card,” Clayton said. “I had to pull teeth to get it, not having an address, but I got it. Just ‘cause you’re homeless doesn’t mean you’re not literate.”

Only 40% of the county’s transients are counted among the chronically homeless--individuals who are usually alienated from family and whose life on the streets has a feeling of permanence. Of these, at least 30% may have mental-health problems, Roper said.

Because mental illness is common in homeless populations, it’s difficult to determine motives for acts of violence, said Costa Mesa Police Lt. Smith. Apparently harmless remarks could be seen as insults, he said.

There are everyday tensions among people forced to live on the streets, Smith said.

“You see a lot of them with bruises, bumps, broken bones,” he said. “But they’re not telling us how it happened.”

Whether Yacovetta’s death was the result of an insult, real or imagined, is unclear.

“When Dave got drunk, he ran his mouth a little bit. We all do,” his friend Carlson said.

Among friends, that was tolerated, Carlson said. Among strangers, under duress and harsh conditions, you never know what could happen, he said.

“Right here, you’re careful not to [mess] with the wrong son of a gun,” Carlson said.

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Because of the cold, the police and the absence of protective cover, nights are times to strategize about where to safely stay.

Some homeless people cope with the rain and the dangers of sleep by taking marathon bus rides from Orange County to Los Angeles. Others go under eaves of storefronts or scour for abandoned homes and buildings. If discovered, they can be arrested.

The cold season also inspires an ever greater rush into shelters.

At the Orange County Rescue Mission in Santa Ana, lines begin to form at 4 p.m. for the shelter’s 40 beds, and tensions often rise as people anxiously wonder whether they’ll get in, said Assistant Chaplain Daniel Saunders.

Because there are only 2,374 emergency shelter beds in the county, most of the homeless would not be able to find shelter even if they looked. And even though the nights have been colder than usual this fall, the county’s armories won’t open until this week.

For people like Jones, stepping into the spartan rescue mission--run, as many shelters are, by a Christian charity--was a chance for spiritual redemption.

“This place was a life-changing blessing,” said Jones, who was a pipe fitter, married for 26 years, before drugs and alcohol sped his decline. “I used to sell drugs on the corner till I chose Jesus Christ.”

On a recent night, Jones spoke to a brother for the first time in five years, and wept as he thought of the coming reconciliation. “My brother welcomed me back into the family,” said Jones, who was homeless for nine years before taking a job with a local church and getting housing through church officials.

Such transformations do happen in the shelters. But for many of the county’s at least 6,000 chronically homeless, the shelters are merely an occasional pit stop, Saunders said. “Some people would rather brave the elements than deal with other people, than risk confrontation.”

Roger, 51, would rather live in a ramshackle, filthy tent with 14 cats under a walnut tree in an Orange city park than stay a night at a shelter.

Despite the cold and the rain, Roger--a triple amputee who looks much older than his years--said he can’t stay in shelters. Once, he said, weeping at the recollection, his monthly government check was stolen at a shelter.

“What was I supposed to do the rest of the month?” he said. “I had to go to the trash cans in Hart Park. I had to beg.”

But despite the anxieties about staying in a shelter, the last thing a transient waiting in line outside one wants to be on a chilly night is the cut-off person.

Alex Alvarez, 46, was that unlucky person at the Rescue Mission recently. The person before him would get the last warm meal of the night.

“I’m just so disgusted by what just happened,” Alvarez said as he stormed off into the street. Moments later, he returned to ask Saunders if there was a chance of a bed the following night.

A Mexican immigrant, as are his parents, Alvarez smiled and boasted that “My dad helped build Disneyland.”

But on this night, hooded but shaking from the cold, Alvarez would sleep on a bus bench.

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David Yacovetta was asleep on a hard gravel strip behind a row of bushes the night he died. The person police say killed “Old Man Dave” was referred to as just “the new guy” by others on the street, said Costa Mesa’s Lt. Smith.

Although Yacovetta mostly stayed in Costa Mesa, the person charged with his murder mostly cycled in and out of the city, Smith said.

The slight, balding Yacovetta showed remorse about his situation, said Kevin Stevens, a volunteer at a Costa Mesa center that helps alcoholics get back on their feet.

“When I gave him money, he cried sometimes,” Stevens said.