Street Spirit June 2004

The Murder of a Homeless Man in Oakland

Editorial by Terry Messman

The savage and senseless torture and murder of a homeless man in Oakland by a group of young men on July 18 is a warning sign of the grave dangers homeless people face due to a rising wave of shocking hate crimes. Such appalling acts of violence have been made nearly inevitable in a climate where politicians, merchants and the media constantly fan the flames of hatred, fear and prejudice against homeless people.

Dalrus Joseph Brown, 52 was viciously murdered in the middle of the night by a group of young men, ages 15-16, which attacked him while he was sleeping along the railroad tracks in West Oakland. The teenagers repeatedly kicked Brown, shot him with a BB gun, and beat him to death with metal pipes and boards, then tore apart his little shelter.

The brutal murder of Brown was only the latest in a series of violent assaults on homeless people in West Oakland, apparently by groups of young men who singled out their victims for attack simply because they were homeless. In a previous attack in early July, three teenagers were arrested after assaulting a homeless man with a piece of lumber in West Oakland. Even though the police have arrested three teenagers for the murder, a larger group of accomplices are just as responsible for the tragic death of Dalrus Joseph Brown.

Homeless advocates all over the country have been warning local, state and federal legislators that homeless people urgently need protection from a new epidemic of hate crimes and murders. These hate crimes have been directly fueled by the constant vilification and scapegoating of homeless people by politicians, merchants and the media.

For the past four years, Street Spirit has reported on these hate crimes in California and across the nation. Homeless people are deliberately sought out, denounced as bums and drug addicts, then attacked, beaten, set on fire, slashed with knives and murdered with guns. Many of the attacks are committed by impressionable young people who are influenced by the media, by reactionary pundits on talk radio and by public defamation of homeless people in newspapers.

On July 8, only 10 days before Dalrus Joseph Brown was murdered, Donald Whitehead warned about this tragedy in words so prophetic and accurate that it now appears like clairvoyance. Speaking at a forum on the criminalization of homeless people at the Meridian Gallery in San Francisco, Whitehead warned that the scapegoating of homeless people by political officials was a reckless incitement to hate crimes. [See Whitehead's full speech on page two of this issue of Street Spirit.]

Whitehead told a San Francisco audience on July 8: "The criminalization of homeless people has other consequences. We have noticed over the last four years a rise in hate crimes against homeless people. As a direct result of the villainization of homeless people, we have seen an increase in horrible acts of violence against people that are homeless in this country. Over the last four years, we have seen 280 incidents of violence against homeless people, and 131 incidents have resulted in death. The crimes have ranged from beheading to drowning to firebombing."

"People are being forced to live away from cities because they have to fear arrest, and they're moving to more obscure locations; and when they move out to those locations, they become susceptible to these kinds of crimes."

People were living at that obscure location - a dumping ground off the railroad tracks in West Oakland next to warehouses and recycling plants - because homeless people have long since found that these hidden locations off the beaten tracks are the only places where they won't be driven away. When they attempt to leave these remote areas and sleep out in safer neighborhoods - in more central locations with better lighting and more people living nearby - they are invariably driven away by the pressure of merchants, police and political officials.

That is why people end up sleeping in unsafe areas along a railroad siding in West Oakland, where they are vulnerable to being attacked and murdered in the dead of night while they are sleeping.

The National Coalition for the Homeless (NCH) has carefully documented that, in the last five years, 281 hate crimes were committed against homeless people and 131 attacks resulted in death. Last year, California was named by the NCH study as the single most dangerous state for homeless people, due to the number of hate crimes and murders here.

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