From the 5-17-03 San Francisco Chronicle:

Shocking Santa Rita Jail death prompts investigation Death While Homeless: Another one bites the dust.

Kevin Freeman had been in jail for being drunk in public and homeless and was due to be released May 10, the day after he was killed. The second killing in the behavioral unit in 13 months, called "a strange anomaly."

By Charles Burress - San Francisco Chronicle, May 17, 2003

Alameda County, CA - The slaying of a longtime Berkeley homeless man at Santa Rita jail has shocked those who knew him for decades on Telegraph Avenue and prompted sheriff's officials to investigate why he was put in the same cell with a young suspect in a violent crime.

The tall, bearded victim -- 55-year-old Kevin Lee Freeman -- was a homeless alcoholic with apparent mental health problems who was well known to Berkeley police and denizens of Telegraph Avenue.

Often seen panhandling in his red tennis shoes, he was familiar also to Alameda County sheriff's deputies for his various stays at Santa Rita for drinking problems over the past 25 years, said sheriff's Lt. Jim Knudsen.

Authorities say he was killed about 3 a.m. May 9 by his cellmate, Ryan Lee Raper, 20, of Copperopolis in Calaveras County. Raper had been in jail on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon in Union City, said sheriff's Lt. Greg Ahern.

The commanding officer of the jail, Capt. Fred Hagan, said it "generally doesn't happen" that drunks are placed in the same cell with suspects in violent crimes. Jail officials are investigating the placement, he said.

"What we have to do is take a look at it," Hagan said. "Anytime we have a death in the jail, that would cause us to review our policies and procedures."

Raper was arraigned Friday in Alameda County Superior Court on charges of killing Freeman. Freeman died of "severe blunt trauma," Ahern said. He would not comment on reports that the scene was shockingly grisly.

Attorney Osha Neumann, who served eight years on the Berkeley Police Review Commission, said, "It's very troubling that this person who clearly had mental disabilities of his own was put in with a violent young man."

The pair had been placed in a two-man cell in the jail's "behavioral ward," a special section for those with evident mental problems, Ahern said.

Hagan said prisoners are routinely screened for their "criminal sophistication" and "medical and psychological needs" before being assigned to cells.

Ahern said Freeman had been in jail for being drunk in public and that he was due to be released May 10, the day after he was killed.

It was the second killing in the behavioral unit in 13 months, which Hagan called "a strange anomaly."

According to court records, Freeman had been sentenced to 30 days in jail on April 24 for violating his probation. (He was given an early release date of May 10.) The probation violation occurred shortly before midnight April 22 when he was arrested by UC Berkeley police for being drunk in public on Telegraph Avenue, said UC police Capt. Bill Cooper.

According to court records, he had been ordered to stay away from Telegraph Avenue until Aug. 12 this year as part of probation in a July 2001 case in which he was convicted of public drunkenness and violating a court order.

Questions over his death coincides with a new study criticizing Alameda County for being the only Bay Area county without a detox center for people like Freeman, said Kathy Berger, executive director of the Telegraph Avenue Association, a coalition of
businesses, residents and community organizations.

"We believe there is a very close correlation between the two (Freeman's death and the lack of a detox center)," said Berger, who released the yearlong study on Thursday.

"We all knew him," she said. "He is one of those people who could have been helped a number of years ago had there been a detox center available to him."

He sometimes panhandled in front of Shakespeare & Co. whose owner, Harvey Segal, described Freeman "as one of the least aggressive -- very quiet, innocuous."

Another veteran of Telegraph, a man calling himself Huckleberry Finn who was selling the Street Spirit paper Friday, said Freeman was "a very, very quiet dude -- he was always by himself."

Neumann said he's received calls from people saying the screening for cell assignment at Santa Rita is not done by mental health professionals but consists of deputies asking "perfunctory questions of whether they're (inmates) going to commit suicide or not."

"There's a problem out at Santa Rita for sure," Neumann said. "There's a problem also for people out on the street who need to get treated. The only intervention is the criminal justice system."

Ahern said the jail screening consists of "practices that we do according to the jail policies and procedures."

The study sponsored by the Telegraph Avenue Association found that "an average three-day stay in a detox facility costs one-third less to taxpayers than the current approach of transporting people via ambulance to jails and psychiatric hospitals and then recycling the homeless back to the streets."

The Telegraph area hosts more than 300 homeless people, about 25 percent of the city's homeless population, the study found.

About 50 percent of the homeless statewide suffer from alcohol and drug addiction, compared with an estimated 70 percent on Telegraph who do, Berger said.

E-mail Charles Burress at cburress@sfchronicle.com 2003 San Francisco Chronicle

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