Vagrants

Amid complaints from business owners that Palmdale's downtown has become a haven for vagrants, vandalism and vacant buildings, the City Council has agreed to form two groups of residents to help guide the city's revitalization plans. The council earlier this week approved a more than $450,000 program to develop a planning blueprint for future activities downtown.

It was easy to miss the elderly man who slept obscured by bushes in the shadows of a corporate courtyard in downtown Pasadena on Wednesday night. Most people don't stroll through this deserted public space after dark, but Janice McNaughton is savvy to the ways of street people because she was recently homeless for several months. "Aha, here's one," McNaughton said. Behind her, a group of people with clipboards surged forward.

Around 7 in the evening on Feb. 23, 1942, while most Southern Californians were listening to President Roosevelt's fireside chat on the radio, strange explosions were heard near Goleta. In the first (and only) attack on U.S. soil since the War of 1812, a Japanese submarine surfaced off the rich oil field on Ellwood Beach, 12 miles west of Santa Barbara, and lobbed 16 shells into the tidewater field.

More than two years after clearing homeless people encamped in the Ventura River bottom, city officials and merchants are now looking for ways to clear homeless people from downtown city streets. The move comes just as the city is set to begin a major revitalization downtown with the construction of a multiscreen theater.

Concerned that an influx of homeless people has increased crime in an affluent Studio City area, a group of residents has called for authorities to use a public nuisance law to prosecute transients. The residents are eager to crack down on so-called "transient criminals," believed by residents to be responsible for offenses ranging from car burglaries to rapes. "Existing criminal codes--burglary, robbery, etc.

In nearly 24 years in Venice, Ty Allison has been threatened with a knife and assaulted by vagrants. Almost daily, he calls police to report that homeless people are using crack and methadone in his driveway. Ana Petrova cleans up human feces every morning in the alley behind Peter's Marina Motors, the business she and her husband have operated on Lincoln Boulevard for 40 years.

Claiming that homeless people are scaring away residents from city parks, the mayor has asked city attorneys to look into drafting an ordinance prohibiting camping in parks and shopping centers. Mayor W.E. (Walt) Donovan, who acknowledges that homelessness is "a tough problem," said he is also taking into account efforts by Santa Ana to evict the homeless from the Civic Center area. He said he fears that Santa Ana's displaced homeless may drift into Garden Grove.

State Sen. Wadie P. Deddeh, who has taken strong anti-drug stands and has served on legislative committees investigating substance abuse, is part-landlord in a downtown San Diego market that neighbors and police say sells fortified wines to vagrants and pipe screens to crack cocaine users. Deddeh (D-Bonita) is one-third owner of a storefront complex on 12th Avenue and Market Street that includes the Valu-Mart market, a small grocery and deli, his economic interest statements show.

On the longest night of his life, Alexander N. Dunayev lay on a bleak stretch of snow beside a railway track through the lonely hours of darkness. At some point, cunning fingers slipped into his jacket to steal his wallet and documents. As the night wore on, Moscow's temperature dropped to 18 below. At home in the city's Khovrino district, Irina K. Dunayev waited for her husband and worried. The 42-year-old television engineer and father of two had called from the Khovrino station at 8:10 p.m.

It's a mystery, Gregory Goins insists, why his chest begins to hurt when it does. He might be riding the bus, walking down the street, dozing on a park bench or smoking a cigarette. Suddenly, the pain comes on, spreading through his rib cage, and Goins remembers just how sick a man he is. That's when his thoughts turn to the emergency room at Highland Hospital. He knows there are doctors and nurses there, ready to help. There are medicines and EKG machines. There are sandwiches.