By Photographer Robert Cohen — Karen Wallensak of Catholic Charities appeals to park rangers and sanitation workers to allow a homeless man to recover his belongings from their truck after makeshift homeless living quarters in Interco Plaza were cleared Thursday morning. The small plaza is at the intersection of Tucker Boulevard and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive.
http://www.stltoday.com/blogzone/st-louis-crime-beat/2009/11/05/st-louis-park-rangers-get-tough-on-homeless/
With homeless shelters overflowing and cold weather setting in, many homeless are left to face the elements in tents and makeshift shelters. In the city of St. Louis, with temperatures dropping well below freezing this time of year, a homeless persons meager possessions can be the only thing enables them to survive to see another day. Thursday, city employees from the St. Louis Parks Division not only took these possessions, but immediately destroyed them.
Shortly before 10 a.m. Thursday, the rangers arrived at Interco Plaza, next to the building housing the St. Patrick’s and the Catholic Charities outreach centers. And, quickly the rangers took tents, blankets, pillows, bags filled with belongings and, even, prescription medications and threw them into an orange garbage truck.
The rangers would not say why they were throwing away the homeless people’s possessions. St. Louis Parks Division Commissioner Daniel W. Skillman, who oversees the rangers, did not return a reporter’s call asking for comment.
Clint Smith, 38 and homeless, rode up on his bicycle begging the rangers to give him his belongings back. Instead, the rangers turned on the device in the truck that crushed everything that Smith owned. He was only able to save an umbrella.
“Oh, man,” Smith said to the rangers. “That was my medicine. That was my stuff. Oh, man. What a waste.”
Included in his belongings were heart and lung medicines.
About a dozen homeless men and women had set up camp a few months ago in the little park at Martin Luther King Drive and Tucker Boulevard after homeless shelters began turning people away.
“Several were staying here because, on any given day, we have more people seeking shelter than there are beds,” said Karen Wallensak, who works for Catholic Charities’ Housing Resource Center in the building next door.
“These people have never caused a problem,” Wallensak said.
About 10 a.m., she said she looked out of her office window and saw what the rangers were doing, then ran outside to try to stop them. She tried to make the rangers give her and her co-workers the belongings to hold on to for the homeless. The rangers refused.
“We are in the shadow of the city’s two biggest homeless providers,” Wallensak said as she grabbed a few garbage bags the rangers had left behind. “They say this is public, not private property, but when people have nowhere to go, what are they supposed to do?”
http://www.stltoday.com/blogzone/st-louis-crime-beat/2009/11/05/st-louis-park-rangers-get-tough-on-homeless/
The inhumanity of the treatment of people who are already down, by some who have a warm bed and a roof over their head never ceases to amaze me.
“I can’t replace what was taken,” Gates said. “It might not look like much to someone else, but these were priceless items to us. It protects us from the cold and the elements.”
The above quote is also from the St. Louis Today article referenced above.
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