Across West Coast, thousands of homeless sleep unsheltered
DALLAS — Close your eyes, she says. Now, tell me. Where are the exits?
This is a drill Suzanna Hupp has done with her two sons. She realizes it may seem paranoid, sitting in a restaurant thinking about things like that. But her sons, both grown now, get it. Bad things happen. Evil exists. Better to be prepared.
Hupp knows. In 1991, she was eating lunch in a Luby’s cafeteria when a gunman drove a blue Ford pickup through the restaurant’s front window, got out and started shooting. He killed 23 people, including Hupp’s mother and father, before finally shooting himself.
In its time, the massacre in Killeen, Texas, was the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
Now it ranks sixth, just behind Sunday’s murder of 26 in the Sutherland Springs First Baptist Church outside of San Antonio.
What happened inside Luby’s is never far from the minds of Hupp and other survivors. And with each mass shooting that follows, they relive their own experiences.
“It brings everything back,” said 71-year-old Kelley Fitzwater, who saw two women shot in the head that day. She can hardly watch the news this week.
“I watch maybe five or 10 minutes, and then I just have to change the channel,” Fitzwater said. “Because it brings all those feelings back. It brings back all of the very bad memories for the families that lost loved ones, as well as the survivors.”
She and her husband were in the Luby’s serving line when George Hennard, 35, of Belton, smashed his truck through the restaurant’s facade.
When he started shooting, Fitzwater’s husband told her to get on the floor.
“Is he here to rob us?” she recalls asking. “No,” she says her husband replied. “He’s here to kill us.”
Fitzwater and her husband managed to escape. She and other survivors say talking about what they went through was a key to dealing with it.
“We had group sessions that we went to, where the survivors and those that had lost loved ones, we all came together,” Fitzwater said. “Really I found for myself, right after this happened, that the more I talked about it, the better off I was.”
Fitzwater said it took her about a year to decide she could move on.
“It was very hard to do,” she said. “At first you deal with guilt, as to why you were a survivor and they weren’t.”
You never forget, she said. “But you learn to move on. Or it would just drive you crazy.”
Hupp, 58, agrees. “You’ve got a couple of different ways to handle stuff like this,” she said. “You can go crazy, or you believe that things happen for a reason. Believe me, I’m going to be one of the first in line when I die with a list of questions for God.”
Those questions boil down to: Why do you let terrible things happen?
Hupp says she worked through her grief with help from a supportive family. She also wrote a book about her experience, and she became a state legislator who advocated the right to carry concealed weapons. (Just before the Luby’s massacre, Hupp had left her own gun in the car.)
“That gave me some outlet for anger, anger both at myself and at the legislature, that I felt had legislated me out of the right to protect myself and my family,” she said.
Cheyvonne Price, who says she is homeless primarily due to heroin addiction, naps on a sidewalk outside a Starbucks in downtown Portland, Ore. Price said she hoped to get enough money during the day to afford a bed at a hostel for the night and said that she wishes people would realize that the homeless “are not all bad people.”
Homelessness is not a new issue to America’s West Coast. But it’s getting worse — much worse.
On any given night, more than 105,000 people are sleeping unsheltered in some of the country’s biggest and trendiest metropolises, driven there by soaring housing costs, rental vacancy rates that rival those in Manhattan and a booming tech economy that’s leaving thousands behind. Another 63,000
Seattle native Robert Irwin, 72, who has been homeless for seven months, walks between rows of tents at Camp Second Chance, a city-sanctioned homeless encampment.
Delmi Ruiz (foreground) sits inside an RV where her family lives and sleeps, as her daughter, Delmi, 4, lies in a bed in Mountain View, Calif. The Ruiz Hernandez family was left homeless after the landlord in the apartment they rented hiked their rent beyond what they could afford.
AP photos
by Ted S. Warren, Jae C. Hong and Marcio Jose Sanchez are sleeping in shelters or transitional housing with no safety net.
The rising numbers have pushed abject poverty into the open like never before.
San Diego now scrubs its sidewalks with bleach to counter a deadly hepatitis A outbreak that has spread to other cities and forced California to declare a state of emergency. In Anaheim, home to Disneyland, 400 people sleep along a bike path in the shadow of Angel Stadium. Organizers in Portland, Oregon, lit incense at a recent outdoor food festival to mask the stench of urine in a parking lot where vendors set up shop.
All along the coast, elected officials are scrambling for solutions.
“It’s a sea of humanity crashing against services, and services at this point are overwhelmed, literally overwhelmed,” said Jeremy Lemoine, who works for a Seattle nonprofit that provides various forms of assistance to the homeless. “It’s catastrophic.