Sacramento attack on homeless couple mirrors national trend of violence

Amelia Martin and her wife, Kristine Price, were packing up their campsite in a grassy field along one of north Sacramento’s derelict commercial sectors when that first rock punched into their tent.

Startled into the open near the corner of Calvados Avenue and Lexington Street, the homeless couple and a nearby friend spied a dozen or so male teenagers, neatly groomed and between the ages of 14 and 17, approaching with sinister purpose.

It was around 8:30 p.m. on Sunday, August 3, but still light out enough to glimpse the youths’ soft, boyish faces— and the menace they conveyed.

Martin called out as a siege of rocks bulleted their way. Then, something, probably a fist, sent her reeling. Price ran to her wife’s defense. In return, Martin said, the pack descended and stomped Price into the ground.

“Blood was just gushing,” Martin recalled. “They just wouldn’t stop.”

Martin begged the teens to cease their attack, which carried on in a wordless frenzy of grunts and fleeting grins for nearly two minutes. Her pleas reached the ears of a female security guard, who was ending her shift outside of a nearby business. The guard sprinted toward the melee, sounding an air horn, which scattered the young mob toward the nearby light-rail tracks.

“She saved our lives, really,” Martin said.

Emergency responders transported Price to a hospital, where she was treated for a broken nose and multiple abrasions.

Police are investigating the unprovoked ambush, which they characterized as brazen and unusual. “I haven’t seen anything like that,” said Officer Michele Gigante, a spokeswoman for the Sacramento Police Department. Neither had the new commander of the department’s homelessness and transience detail, she added. “Let’s hope it’s just the one incident.”

But violence against homeless people—particularly by multiple assailants of a young age—are common throughout the country and especially in California, said Michael Stoops, community-organizing director of the National Coalition for the Homeless.

His organization recently distributed a national survey that attempted to quantify the problem. Using first-person accounts, media reports and information from service providers, the coalition tabulated 1,437 violent attacks on homeless individuals at the hands of “housed perpetrators” between 1999 and 2013, more than a quarter of which proved fatal.

Perpetrators were “most commonly” teenage boys, the survey states.

The violence resulted in the deaths of 375 homeless people during the 15-year survey period, more than double the 132 homicides that all other hate-crime protected classes suffered during the same period combined, Stoops said. “Which is astounding.”

According to the coalition, the biggest proportion of homeless assaults—roughly 20 percent—occurred in the Golden State, which also claims the greatest share of the nation’s homeless.

The organization tallied 33 attacks throughout California last year, including a September incident in which three young men may have set fire to a sleeping homeless veteran in Los Angeles, and April reports of teens shooting homeless people in Fresno with paint guns.

“I’m glad I’m not homeless in California,” Stoops said.

Youth-driven crime and arrest rates have rarely been lower in the state, according to the California Department of Justice.

The coalition survey does not include last month’s now-viral incident in which a California Highway Patrol officer in Los Angeles repeatedly punched the face of a homeless woman lying on the ground.

While an investigation into that videotaped event is underway, earlier this year, a jury acquitted two former Fullerton police officers charged with the 2011 beating death of a homeless man. Video surveillance of the ordeal showed the victim crying out for his father.

“Homeless people don’t have great relationships with police departments,” Stoops said.

That wasn’t the case here. Martin said officers who patrolled the area where she and her wife camped since June “actually looked out for us.”

At the time of the assault, Martin and Price were gathering their belongings so they could resettle by the shrouded banks of the American River, where some friends had established a camp with their dogs. The women wanted to be closer to Sacramento Loaves & Fishes and other social services, but also felt the move would provide additional security. “We were really just trying to get away from it all … just trying to get to where it’s safer,” Martin said.

She initially worried her wife’s injuries were as grave as they appeared. A searing migraine set in after paramedics slid Price onto a gurney and loaded her into the ambulance, cuing fears of a concussion or worse. “For me, it seemed like she was touch and go,” Martin said.

At UC Davis Medical Center, doctors ordered a full workup of body and bone scans, which came up clean. Discharged two days later with a subscription for pain medication and a referral to a cosmetic surgeon, Price and her wife were able to spend the next few days recuperating in a motel room, paid for by Price’s son.

They’d never before experienced such danger during their years living on the streets, they told SN&R. “I believe it was a hate crime,” Martin said.

The National Coalition for the Homeless supports hate-crime protection status for homeless individuals, but such efforts have come up short in this state. “Right now, homelessness is not part of California’s hate-crimes statute,” Stoops said.

He added that three separate governors have vetoed legislation to change that. “Your current governor did the same damn thing,” he said.

The coalition also supports federal legislation, originally introduced in 2010, to require better reporting of crimes against homeless people by law enforcement. As of now, authorities aren’t required to itemize such data in the uniform crime reports they send to the FBI, which is why the coalition culled and cross-checked its survey using other sources.

Stoops said the coalition is the only entity keeping track of bias-motivated attacks against the homeless.

Asked what Sacramento’s homeless community could do to protect themselves, Officer Gigante urged victims to come forward. “The crime needs to be reported,” she said. “You’re a victim of a crime regardless of your economic status or housing status.”

Martin signed up for Social Security through Guest House Homeless Clinic, which assists homeless people with mental-health issues. The expedited process should whittle the average wait time from two years to 87 days, she said. “That will help us,” she said, sitting beside the wife who came to her rescue.