She Beat the Rap of Being Homeless

“Can I help you?” a clerk asked through a window at the North Justice Center in Fullerton.

“Yes. I’d like to pay a fine,” said Diane Grue, who held five crisp $20 bills folded lengthwise in her leather-skinned hand.

While the clerk called up the computer file Thursday, Grue told me she was still in shock. Moments earlier, Superior Court Judge James P. Marion had thrown out a case in which the great-grand-mother could have gone to jail for being homeless.

“I can’t believe it,” Grue said with a look of utter relief. “I’m free.”

And $100 richer too. The clerk informed her that Judge Marion had waived the fine, which appeared to have been left over from an earlier arrest for having nowhere to sleep.

You could say Grue’s triumph made it a 50-50 week for the down-and-out.

The Los Angeles County district attorney decided not to prosecute an LAPD sharpshooter who in 1999 gunned down a 5-foot-1, 105-pound mentally ill homeless woman. Margaret Laverne Mitchell was armed with a screwdriver and allegedly lunged at an officer. Our brave man in blue shot her in the chest.

Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley, who campaigned as a tough guy, was conveniently unavailable to explain why he’d fired a blank in the most preposterous case of police overreaction since cops took batting practice on Rodney King. Cooley’s office, covering for the indisposed boss, explained there was conflicting testimony.

“I just feel sorry for her,” Diane Grue said of Margaret Mitchell as we left the Fullerton courthouse and walked into the noon sunshine.

Although Grue is lucky she doesn’t live within shooting range of L.A., she could have picked a better Orange County campsite than Buena Park. So says a blue-suspendered man of the cloth who runs a shelter there.

“Orange County does very little for the homeless, but Buena Park is the worst of the worst,” Pastor Wiley Drake of the First Baptist Church said outside the courthouse. “All they do is sweep, sweep, sweep.”

Grue got swept with five others Nov. 25 while camping along the Union Pacific tracks east of Stanton Avenue. Her high crime: camping in an area of public access. City Prosecutor Greg Palmer, gunning for Junior Crimebuster of the Year, insisted that Grue go to jail because it was her sixth arrest in two years.

Palmer, though, was no match for Grue.

“I didn’t feel I was guilty,” she said, and the more we talked, I realized she wasn’t making a legal defense, but a human one.

Her only son died 12 years ago in an accident, and she fell into a black hole, Grue said. She lost her job as a hotel maid, stayed in cheap motels on pension checks, dropped out of touch with family, and spent an occasional night or two on the street when the money ran out.

“I was just so depressed,” she says.

Grue understands why city officials, merchants and residents wouldn’t want people camping on the streets, she said. “I agree that some of the homeless are sloppy too,” she added. “But I just needed a couple of nights out there until my check came in.”

Her attorney, Jon Alexander, was prepared to challenge the constitutionality of Buena Park’s vagrancy statute. But he didn’t have to. A sympathetic Union Pacific railroad man called him in the middle of Grue’s trial to say the campsite was on the railroad’s property, not public property.

“Right now I’m numb,” crimebuster Palmer said at the time about the blow to his chances of putting a 66-year-old homeless granny behind bars.

I was numb reading his quote. I don’t know what it cost taxpayers to prosecute this case, or what Palmer is making. But whatever the sum, they probably could have put Grue up in a four-star hotel for years.

Judge Marion told me he tossed the case because of the railroad company’s claim. And when she left the courthouse, Grue had two reasons to smile.

Publicity about the case reunited her with family she hadn’t seen in years. Her grandson Cole, 24, looks just like the son she lost, Grue said.

“Come on out with us,” Cole said, urging his long-lost grandma to move in with the family in Hesperia.

“I’m paid up on the motel a couple more days,” Grue said. “I can do it on Tuesday.”

As the family celebrated, attorney Alexander, who defended Grue for no fee, broke out his guitar. Right there, at the front door of the courthouse, he began singing Bruce Springsteen’s “Ghost of Tom Joad,” an ode to the destitute.

Men walkin’ ‘long the railroad tracks

Goin’ someplace there’s no goin’ back.

And then Pastor Wiley Drake and I met at the railroad tracks and walked the ties in the blazing sun, headed for the campsite where Grue was arrested.

No one lives near enough, far as I could tell, to be bothered by the occasional lost soul who sleeps under the stars.

Nothing out there but dust and untold stories.

Steve Lopez can be reached at steve.lopez@latimes.com

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Case dismissed: Charges a homeless woman violated camping law are dismissed. B7