Thirty four people people died “Without Fixed Abode” in OC in April, 2023. Their names are:
Ashley CRADER who died on April 2nd in Anaheim
Christopher BOWMAN who died on April 3rd in San Clemente
Scott WHEELER who died on April 3rd in Huntington Beach
Shelly JOHN who died on April 4th in Orange
Marlina ADAME who died on April 7th in Santa Ana
Richard MONTOYA who died on April 9th in Costa Mesa
Michael PECINA who died on April 11th in Santa Ana
Zechariah ELIZALDE who died on April 11th in Anaheim
Daniel HURTT who died on April 12th in Newport Beach
Dewey WORLEY who died on April 12th in Anaheim
Charles MOORE who died on April 13th in Orange
Christopher JONES who died on April 13th in Westminster
Brian SCHAAR who died on April 13th in Santa Ana
William HENDERSON who died on April 15th in Anaheim
Andrew CAPACI who died on April 17th in Stanton
David GLYNN who died on April 18th in Laguna Beach
Scott JONES who died on April 19th in Santa Ana
Michael ROOSE who died on April 19th in La Palma
Patrick GREEN who died on April 20th in Anaheim
James VANGEL who died on April 21st in Fullerton
Jose MEJIA-BALDAZAR who died on April 22nd in Garden Grove
Jana GOULDING who died on April 22nd in Orange
Michael GUZMAN who died on April 22nd in Orange
Patrick WETTGEN who died on April 23rd in Mission Viejo
Megan ROACHE who died on April 24th in Capistrano Beach
Donald MONTELONGO who died on April 24th in Santa Ana
Lonnell WORTHY who died on April 25th in Santa Ana
Jacob KOLAR who died on April 25th in Huntington Beach
Michael ANAYA who died on April 25th in Santa Ana
Scott GEE who died on April 26th in La Habra
Catherine COCCOMO-CLEARY who died on April 26th in Garden Grove
Michelle SPIRTOS who died on April 26th in Mission Viejo
Johnny NGUYEN who died on April 30th in Westminster
David MILLER who died on April 30th in Huntington Beach
Additionally 2 additional Brothers and Sisters of ours died “Without Fixed Abode” in OC in March, 2023 but whose deaths were only recorded in March
Dawn KUEHL who died on March 30th in Tustin
Laura ASTRIN who died on March 30th in Newport Beach
The 34 person death toll for April marks a significant decrease from the record count of 54 people who had died last month and even the 41 person death toll for April 2022.
The weather finally improved last month. The County implemented a quite aggressive Narcan distribution program, to make the antidote to Fentanyl available to the public, and there appeared to be change in the OC jails release policy significantly lowering the number of former inmates being released in the middle of the night when virtually everything is closed.
Still, the death toll for April in 2020 and 2021 were 34 and 32, comparable to this year’s numbers. And in April 2019, the number of deaths 19. However, any improvement needs to be encouraged.
In the past month probably the most significant development on the homeless front in OC was the April 19th bimonthly meeting of the OC Commission to End Homelessness.
It began well enough with District Attorney Todd Spitzer in particular offering to look into streamline procedures to resolve and perhaps even vacate a large number of the multitude of petty warrants (often for previous failures to appear) burdening both the county’s homeless population as well as then the agencies that are tasked to serve it.
As I’ve noted in recent columns, this becomes a life and death matter, as the report of the Homeless Death Review Board headed by OC Sheriff Barnes and released in February found that 80% of those people who had died homeless in OC in 2021 had previous arrests / incarcerations, often for very short periods of time:
242 of the 395 people who had died homeless in OC in 2021 (or 61.2% of the total) had been incarcerated for less than a month, 168 (42.5% of the death toll) had been incarcerated for less than a week, 75 (or 19.0% of the death toll) had been incarcerated for less than one day (!).
So movement toward streamlining the process (offering as DA Spitzer suggested a traveling “night court” option at the County’s shelters) could, in fact, save lives, especially if a person’s petty (nonviolent, often simply procedural) warrants cease to kept as impediments to enter into an OC shelter.
That all said, by the second half of the OC Commission to End Homelessness Meeting, it deteriorated into a largely uncontested “profession of faith” that a “housing first” solution “cannot work.”
But what does one mean by “cannot work?”
Even Salt Lake City, which broke the ground in testing the “housing first strategy” acknowledged from the beginning that “housing alone” was going to work for only about 50% of its homeless population, that another 35% were going to have to be provided with assistance to overcome drug addiction and mental illness problems, and that about 15% were not going to be able to be helped any strategy.
In recent years, the criticism of the housing first strategy in Utah has been that while it did succeed (and spectacularly so) in placing 93% of its previously homeless population in housing between 2005-2015, it has been unable to move those people to the next step of returning to being productive citizens.
But this is literally “the next step,” a step that OC and most of California has been unable to reach (or even try to reach).
So to motivate us to move forward, the question to all of us must remain:
Where do we prefer our housing insecure people to be?
If the answer is to keep them desperate, sleeping on our streets, urinating and eventually shooting up in our parks, we’re succeeding.
But can we see the advantage of the Salt Lake City model, where about 90% of its previously homeless population is off the streets in housing. And continued challenges can be addressed with social services and at times with “beat cops” (yes, with occasional attendant arrests, but at least the people have some place to go back to after their release)?
We seem to continue to choose to keep our poorest, most vulnerable, and yes at times most challenging people in the worst possible place for us all. Why?
Fr. Dennis Kriz, OSM, Pastor St. Philip Benizi Catholic Church, Fullerton.
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