Homeless

County supervisors Tuesday unanimously approved a $5.6-million plan to house and provide health services for the 50 most vulnerable homeless people on skid row, as identified in a survey last month. Organizers of "Project 50," must report back to the supervisors at least every 90 days, and board members directed county staffers to review the project's budget. Outreach teams of social workers and other homeless advocates are scheduled to return to skid row next week to begin encouraging the at-risk homeless individuals to move into county-funded apartments.

Hours after accused serial killer Itzcoatl Ocampo allegedly stabbed a homeless man to death in an Anaheim parking lot, he was interviewed by a veteran detective. When Ocampo was asked what sort of consequences he deserved, the 23-year-old answered without hesitation: the death penalty - lethal injection - or "whatever is quickest," the detective, Daron Wyatt, later told a grand jury panel. On Monday, Orange County Dist. Atty. Tony Rackauckas said his office had come to the same conclusion and announced that he would seek the death penalty against the former Marine.

City officials in Laguna Beach voted unanimously Tuesday night to repeal the city's anticamping ordinance, which banned sleeping or camping overnight in public parks and on beaches. A lawsuit against the city brought by the American Civil Liberties Union in December decried the policy as "harassing" and "intimidating" to the homeless. A city committee is examining whether to pass a new ordinance governing sleeping outside. Police have not enforced the ordinance for about a year, according to city staff.

The mother of a mentally ill homeless man who died after he was beaten by Fullerton police has reached a settlement with the city that will pay her $1 million, officials announced Tuesday evening. The agreement unanimously approved by the Fullerton City Council resolves Cathy Thomas' legal claims against the city involving the death of Kelly Thomas, 37. He died July 10, five days after his violent confrontation with Fullerton Police Department officers. Thomas reached the settlement after voluntary mediation with her attorney, city officials said.

If you buy something from online auctioneer Property Room, you don't have to wonder if it was stolen. That's because it probably was. Property Room, started by a former police detective, gets its items from law enforcement property rooms nationwide. Most of its inventory of jewelry, bicycles, computers, furniture, tools, car stereos, cameras, sports equipment, portable music players and things that could best be categorized under miscellaneous -- or bizarre -- was seized from crooks.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Anna Brown was homeless and had so much pain in her legs that she couldn't walk. When Brown, 29, refused to leave the emergency room at St. Mary's Health Center in Richmond Heights, Mo., a suburb near inner St. Louis, the police thought she was on drugs and arrested her for trespassing. She'd already been examined, and a doctor said she was healthy enough to go to jail. The police carried her into a jail cell by her arms and ankles, her body slackened.

Spike Lee has reached an agreement with the Florida couple forced to flee their home after the film director retweeted their home address and they fled to a hotel to avoid problems associated with the shooting of Trayvon Martin, it was announced Thursday. Elaine and David McClain, in their 70s, left their Sanford, Fla., home after their address was tweeted by a man who thought he had found the home of George Zimmerman, the 28-year-old who shot Martin, 17.  Lee then retweeted the McClains' address to his followers on Twitter.

To reach the secret place they call the Cave, its denizens must climb a ladder toward a small, hard-to-notice opening in the tall concrete slab that helps hold up the 10 Freeway. They must squeeze beneath a rusty metal grating, balance on a ledge and descend a second ladder into thick, dead air and darkness. This is home, a vast, vault-like netherworld, strewn with garbage and syringes. Richard Dafoe likes it here, even with 3-foot cobwebs and the constant thrum of freeway traffic overhead.

Former construction worker John Dutchover found his own tiny piece of Brentwood last year, staking out a space on San Vicente Boulevard for the recreational vehicle that -- with a bed, refrigerator and microwave -- also serves as his home. The Gulf War veteran said he picked the spot largely because it was close to the leafy Veterans Affairs campus, where he receives medical treatment.

Whether it is grilled squab at Spago or fettuccine Parmesan at Gennaro's, restaurant leftovers have a common fate around Los Angeles. " Lo buttiamo via, " explained a waiter quietly in Italian. "We throw it away." The homeless in a dozen cities across the nation, including Chicago, New York and Atlanta, dine nightly on scraps from the finest white-linen restaurants. At upscale Chez Panisse in Berkeley, ham carved into perfect rectangles becomes prosciutto.

I began worrying more than seven years ago, when I first brought him the violins donated by readers. Would they make my new friend, a Juilliard-trained musician who'd suffered a breakdown 35 years earlier, less safe on the streets of skid row? Would he be attacked by thieves? And that was just the beginning of the worries. As I got to know Nathaniel Anthony Ayers better, I fretted not just about whether I could protect him, but also about how to help him. Time passes; the worries never do. Uncertainty lingers constantly when you have a relationship with someone who has a severe mental illness, and watching the video this week of the Kelly Thomas beating was a reminder of how quickly things can go horribly awry.

Every parent knows what it's like to fail his or her child in some important way. We speak a hurtful word. We are absent at a critical moment, or we simply fail to hear what our children are telling us. The three moms I met this week at the Homegirl Café know this feeling well. It was a few days before Mother's Day and we sat down together for lunch and talked about the many sorrows they've inflicted on their children. "You make wrong choices, and your kids pay for them," Veronica Duran, a 39-year-old mother of two, told me. The personal histories of these three moms include drug abuse, homelessness and stints in prison that caused them to miss many, many of their sons' and daughters' birthdays.

"I sleep in trash cans. " It is a minute and 45 seconds into the security camera video. Kelly Thomas, 37, jaws with police officers at a Fullerton bus depot, his arms crossed over his bare chest, his backpack double-strapped. It is the night of July 5, 2011, about 8:30. It's still 80 degrees outside. A few pedestrians wander by. A car passes. There is no indication that the lives of every person on the tape are about to change. "You planning on going to sleep pretty soon?"

The police officers who pummeled Kelly Thomas during a violent encounter last summer in Fullerton caused his death by cutting off the flow of oxygen to his brain when the fight intensified and they piled on the homeless man, a coroner's pathologist testified Tuesday. Dr. Aruna Singhania, who told the court she had performed 11,000 autopsies, said the difficulty Thomas had breathing because of chest compression as the struggle wore on was worsened by facial and nasal bleeding. The testimony came in the second day of a preliminary hearing that has orbited around a graphic and disturbing video of Thomas' being hit by police outside the bus depot in downtown Fullerton.

EVENT At Hike for the Homeless, participants will stroll through sylvan Griffith Park to raise money and awareness for a less placid problem – the ongoing homelessness crisis in L.A. Proceeds form the second annual event benefit will benefit the Society of St Vincent de Paul's Cardinal Manning Center, a Skid Row shelter. Griffith Park, 4730 Crystal Springs Drive, L.A. L.A. 8:30 a.m. Sat. $30. hike4thehomeless.com

Until the mats, blankets and other comforts of Necessity Village were finally packed up at sunrise Tuesday, Jerome Clark had been sleeping soundly for the first time in years. For the last decade, the 65-year-old homeless man's on-and-off residence has been the Santa Ana Civic Center, usually the lawn. Like others who live on the streets of Orange County's second largest city, Clark said his nights were fitful, sleep always elusive as he worried about being slapped with a ticket for violating the city's no-camping ordinance.

The number of people who died on downtown L.A.'s skid row has declined by 36% in the last four years, according to city records, the latest sign of major changes on what for decades has been the city's epicenter of homelessness and drug-dealing. Excluding murders and suicides, 60 people died in the skid row area in 2008, according to Los Angeles Police Department statistics. In 2005, there were 94 such deaths.

Re "Connecting the spots," March 12, and "L.A. hopes its park will be as grand as Chicago's," March 14 The Times' two long articles on the new Civic Center Park downtown did a great job of discussing many aspects of the project but refrained from mentioning one: its interaction with the single most powerful visual and emotional aspect of downtown L.A. -- the very large population of homeless people. Thanks. I don't like thinking of them either. Douglas K. Fenwick Pacific Palisades

In a few months, the Los Angeles County Housing Authority will begin allowing rent subsidies to be granted to homeless ex-convicts on parole or probation. The move is controversial, with some critics complaining that it rewards criminals, giving them special treatment and moving them to the front of the line for the limited and much-sought-after subsidies. But that's shortsighted. Homeless ex-convicts, including many who committed only minor, nonviolent crimes, don't go away if they don't get housing aid. Although there are risks associated with the new rule, they're risks worth taking.

Carol Schatz, a leading advocate for downtown business owners, says in her April 9 Times Op-Ed article that a federal judge's ruling to uphold the property rights of skid row's homeless residents enables homelessness. I am a homeless enabler. My organization, Los Angeles Catholic Worker, has been publicly accused by police and the business community of being homeless enablers because we provide food -- more than 5,000 meals weekly. We provide blankets, raincoats and heavy blue tarps for shelter.