Seeking Answers for a Death in a Hobo Jungle

Two weeks ago, Tom Clark knew almost nothing of the people who sleep among the bushes and meandering dirt trails near the edge of the Ventura River.

He had only heard a few stories from his uncle, James Clark, a homeless alcoholic who had lived there himself, in Ventura’s Hobo Jungle, for more than two decades.

But in the past two weeks Tom Clark has made it his business to find out everything he can about the homeless men and women who were his uncle’s companions. It is his way of doing his duty. “This is family. This is blood,” Clark says. “You can’t get that back.”

On June 29, James Clark was beaten to death as he slept on a patch of sandy dirt he considered his home on the edge of Ventura. The homeless people who knew him best found his bloodied corpse the next morning.

Since the day the coroner’s office gave him the news, Tom Clark has searched for answers and vowed to bring some dignity to his uncle’s death.

He has found some of those answers among the band of people who shared their booze and food with his Uncle Jim. He has also stood with them at the primitive shrine of rocks they built in the shape of a cross on the spot where his uncle was killed.

And he says he is feeling good that his uncle is being remembered with respect.

“He was doing exactly what he wanted to do,” Tom Clark said. “And he deserves for someone to know that he was a victim.”

There is no disputing that fact, police and prosecutors say. On Wednesday, Timothy John Becker, Christopher Michael Dunham and Robert Allen Upton, all 18, were charged with robbery and murder in the death of James Clark.

The three face a July 24 arraignment and are eligible for the death penalty. Police suspect the three and a 14-year-old boy first robbed Clark and later returned to beat him and pummel him with rocks. The 14-year-old appeared briefly in Juvenile Court Thursday, where formal arraignment was postponed until Aug. 1.

James Clark lived with his nephew’s family briefly in the early 1970s before he rented a home in Newbury Park and found a job as a sheet metal worker. He left his job and his house about 20 years ago and moved to the Ventura riverbed. From time to time, Tom Clark would see his uncle. He would leave notes for him at a local homeless shelter inviting him to holiday dinners; sometimes the uncle showed up, sometimes he did not.

Since the discovery of the body and the arrests, Clark has made several trips to the Ventura River to track down his uncle’s riverbed colleagues.

Tom Clark’s father died in 1986. Clark believes his father would have done the same thing. In paying his respects to his uncle, he was also honoring his father’s memory, Clark said.

Tom Clark first went to the beach near Surfers Point, where local surfers spoke fondly of James Clark and told his nephew how his uncle would watch their gear while they were in the water. In return, they would buy the 58-year-old Army veteran lunch or dinner.

Ventura’s homeless were not nearly as eager to talk, Clark said.

“At first they thought I was a cop,” the nephew recalled. “They frisked me. . . . But once they trusted me I got an overwhelming response. People in the street knew him and said nothing but good things about him.”

Thursday afternoon, Clark took one more trip across the oily train trestle that crosses the Ventura River estuary. Down a dirt trail marked by the remnants of yellow police tape, he stared at the stone cross, surrounded on three sides by thick weeds and scrub brush.

Tom Clark said a memorial is set for 11 a.m. Saturday at the Joseph P. Reardon Funeral Home on Main Street in Ventura.