‘Pirate man’ recalled as neighborhood character

In many ways, Paulus Smit had made the Yorba Linda library his home. It was there that he read his favorite car magazines and daily newspapers and on sunny days, more often than not, sat under one of the magnolia trees. He was not consistently homeless, yet Smit, 57, had become a friendly fixture in the small town, where horse trails run along sidewalks and residents feel connected.

There is a series of wide, wall-lined steps on the side of the sleek, nicely apportioned library. About 4 p.m. on the afternoon of Dec. 30, those steps became a killing ground. Smit was stabbed more than 60 times, becoming the third victim in a series of brutal killings of homeless men in northern Orange County.

On Tuesday, Dist. Atty. Tony Rackauckas announced that Itzcoatl “Izzy” Ocampo, 23, will be tried on four counts of special circumstances murder in four deaths between Dec. 20 and Jan. 13.

“Often these types of victims are preyed upon because the perpetrator does not believe that anyone would care about or miss them,” Rackauckas said at a news conference.

Indeed, each of the victims had a story, and Smit’s in particular does not fit neatly into the stereotype of homelessness.

Despite long, sometimes stringy hair and a grizzled beard, Smit was affectionately known among the neighborhood kids as “pirate man.” There was no fear. Others who knew him, from his neighbors to library staff members, called him “Dutch.” His three grown children still called him “Papa.”

“We knew he needed our help,” said one of his daughters, Julia Smit-Lozano, 32, who lives in nearby Anaheim. “He would say he would camp out instead.”

When a photo of Smit’s yellow bike flashed on the television news, many in Yorba Linda instantly knew Dutch was dead.

That bike, however, had vanished that morning, along with his bed roll, upsetting Smit. It was only after Ocampo’s arrest that authorities connected the stolen bike to the suspect, according to sources close to the investigation who spoke on condition of anonymity because the case is ongoing.

Smit had only recently become homeless again after the Yorba Linda home where he had been living was red-tagged as uninhabitable. But he loved the outdoors and the freedom of not being tied down. He once said that the stars were a blanket in the sky that he liked to sleep under.

His death stunned some of those who work nearby. It left his children, with whom he talked almost daily, bewildered and grieving. His girlfriend is still in disbelief that he is gone.

“It was relentless, it’s so violent,” Smit-Lozano said.

Born in Holland, Smit moved to the United States with his parents when he was a boy. Eventually, the family made its way to Huntington Beach, where his father, a native of the Netherlands, worked as a machinist and his mother, who was Indonesian, worked in the aerospace industry.

Smit had a disdain for authority from an early age, and was in trouble often, his family said. In adulthood, he had trouble keeping a job, sometimes thinking he could do it better than his supervisors. Court records show a number of drug arrests. He always found ways to get by.

Julia Hansen, 50, of Westminster, met Smit when she was a teenager. He was driving tow trucks at the time. He would go on to work at a tire shop, and also repossessed cars. The two had three children together.

“He was a good man,” she said. “He just had his own way of doing things.”

When Smit-Lozano was 8, her parents split up. In the years that followed, Smit’s homes changed dramatically at times. He once bought a school bus because he wanted to live on the beach; occasionally home would be a sidewalk, a car or a trailer.

Yet Smit never lost touch with his children, who lived with their maternal grandparents after the breakup. During his visits, he and the children would sit on the front porch in lawn chairs, chatting.

And if anything could be called his signature through those years, it would have been his bike.

Smit could carry everything he owned on his bicycle, said Brenda Burke, who lives in Cathedral City. She recalled how around 2003, Smit rode up to her Garden Grove home with a portable television strapped to his bicycle, which was “bigger than he was,” she said.

He explained to Burke that he could power his television that way. “When I ride my bike, I get a better picture,” he joked.

To Smit, other people’s trash carried value. He called dumpsters “the gettin’ place,” according to his daughters. When Heather Smit-Rayo, his youngest daughter, gave birth to a girl in 2009, Smit acquired a swing for her that way.

“He did the best that he could within his means,” she said.

Recently, he had been living with his girlfriend, Tressa Cole, at her mother’s home in Yorba Linda. The two collected trash together, with the home’s front yard full of random objects: mattresses, boxes of plumbing parts, tools and magazines.

Trent Douglass, a pastor who lives down the street from the house, said there are about 20 children in the neighborhood, but he never feared for their safety. “I wasn’t worried about my kids playing around them,” he said. But each time anything disappeared, the children’s first thought was Smit, hence the “pirate man” nickname.

Chris Doyle, an art director who lives next door, said he often spoke with Smit. Doyle once asked him to fish out a trailer hitch for his truck. Smit found one in minutes.

“He was a very personable guy,” Doyle said.

Ramon Salinas, the morning supervisor at the Chevron station just north of the Yorba Linda library, said he never thought Smit was a bother.

“Sometimes he would pay with pennies, nickels, whatever, for cigarettes,” he said. Smit preferred full-flavored Pall Malls.

A couple doors down, Rodney Lascari, the owner of a pizza shop, said Smit collected aluminum near the dumpsters.

“He was a cool guy,” Lascari said.

Smit and his daughters had a special bond. Smit-Lozano, in particular, seemed to understand his lifestyle, especially after her own brief time of living on the streets. She often helped her father, buying him $5 gift cards from Wal-Mart and 7-Eleven so he could have money. She also bought him a pager so he could stay in touch.

But the rough and tumble life was starting to wear on Smit. Just before Christmas, he had been in the hospital for a heart ailment. He told his daughters that life on the streets wasn’t the same, and sometimes he called and asked for help. But he liked living on his own, with no rules and so, at times, preferred the streets.

He spent the holidays with Smit-Lozano. She remembers that on Christmas Day he was trying to calm Cole’s nerves about some impending paperwork. He told her to enjoy the warmth.

On the day of his death, he called Smit-Rayo to tell her about the stolen bike. He was upset, she said, and went to the boarded-up house where he had been living, collected another bike, put air in the tires and searched for his bed roll and his medications.

Those close to the case believe that Smit’s bike had been moved to the last place he slept, across the street from the library.

And no one is sure why he was on the library steps when he was attacked.

“It looks like he just walked into an ambush,” Smit-Lozano said.

Since that day, Smit-Lozano has lighted a candle in memory of her father. And each day, when she wakes up, she talks to him. She says, “I’m sorry, Papa.”

nicole.santacruz@latimes.com