A homeless woman died, run over by a lawnmower. California must wake up | Opinion
The news of a homeless woman’s gruesome fate in Modesto, her body partly dismembered upon being run over and dragged by mowing equipment in a public park, should serve as a wake-up call to all of California.
In the richest state in the richest nation on earth, this is what we’ve come to? Mourning family members finding bits of clothing and human remains in the park where their loved one slept?
You hear clichés about a parent’s worst nightmare. Right now it’s hard to imagine something worse than what the family of 27-year-old Christine Chavez encountered at Modesto’s Beard Brook Park after she died there. Eric Caine, whose heroic coverage of unhoused people and issues for The Valley Citizen goes back years, wrote that Chavez’s father “carried shattered pieces of bone in a small plastic bag.” Her father told Fox News that he recovered “pieces of her skull and some teeth. It’s terrible.”
This nightmare leaves multiple parties in grief and shock. They include the unwitting tractor driver who, while towing a huge mowing unit, apparently didn’t know it had plowed over a body until spotting it on a subsequent pass. The company holding a landscaping contract with City Hall, which owned the park until the day before Christine Chavez’s death. E.&J. Gallo, the world’s largest winery, which took possession of the park in a land swap with the city.
For the city of Modesto, loved as it is by those of us who raised our families here, there must be acknowledgment that this isn’t the first time a homeless person met an unspeakable fate in our public spaces. In 2018, another 32-year-old homeless woman asleep in debris was crushed to death by a Caltrans front-loader clearing an encampment along Highway 99.
Both deaths were worse than sobering because they were entirely preventable.
All of California should be unnerved.
A lack of affordable housing in California is at the root of the homeless crisis in our state. A recent study by the University of California, San Francisco found that more than 171,000 people experience homelessness daily. About 12% of homeless people in the United States live in California. Nine out of 10 people surveyed by UCSF had lost their housing in California. The majority were homeless in the same county where they last had housing. Substance abuse and mental health challenges were also common.
When there isn’t enough housing, when it’s more expensive than many can afford, and when there is not enough treatment for people hurting emotionally, then we have what happened to Christine Chavez in Modesto.
It’s not like the idea of providing the unhoused with a safe place to sleep has never come up. Three Modesto City Council members — Eric Alvarez, Nick Bavaro and Chris Ricci — are on record espousing exactly that, in the form of safe camping areas with tents, showers and services connecting people with the help they need.
Although the Modesto council is a like-minded bunch compared to their predecessors, this is one subject on which they do not see eye to eye. It’s the same story across California: While we argue over treatment, enforcement and how to create more housing, government bodies keep rejecting affordable housing projects and people keep dying.
Modesto Council rejects safe camping
Those in the dithering majority on this issue — Modesto Mayor Sue Zwahlen and council members Dave Wright, Rosa Escutia-Braaton and Jeremiah Williams — should come forward with their plan to keep something like this from happening again, whatever it might be.
It’s understood that grouping troubled people close together, as the mayor notes, has its challenges. That’s why you also bring in services — help with addictions, mental health and job searching.
It’s understood that such social services normally fall under the umbrella of county government. That’s why the city and county should constantly work together. Again, the inability of government agencies to work together on homelessness is as much of a problem in Sacramento as it is in Modesto.
It’s understood that safe camping requires police attention from a stretched-thin force. Helping cops was one reason Modesto voters in November agreed to burden themselves with higher sales tax. Police Chief Brandon Gillespie and City Manager Joe Lopez should go to work to be worthy of the trust placed in them. And those who refuse to be helped must face consequences, as well.
Perhaps it’s time for Stanislaus District Attorney Jeff Laugero to investigate whether Modesto officials are following their own ordinances regarding the unhoused. That is what’s happening in Sacramento under its district attorney, Thien Ho, who has reached the end of his rope at the lack of progress in his community.
And Sacramento isn’t even suffering the shame of two unhoused people mangled in their sleep in a public place by heavy machinery. No one deserves that.
What’s it going to take, Modesto? What’s it going to take, California? How many more vulnerable people like Christine Chavez have to die before we start asking why she was sleeping in a park in the first place?
