'Sport Killings' of Homeless
While I'm sure that this CNN article is more hype than is necessary, the fact that some tennagers are killing the homeless is awful.
This account of such a crime is disturbing:
It was a mistake, he said, a sudden primal surge that made him and his friends Luis Oyola, 16, and 17-year-old Andrew Ihrcke begin punching and kicking Baum.
"Luis says 'I'm gonna go hit him,' We're all laughing, thought he was joking around,'" but he wasn't, Moore concedes. "We just all started hitting him."
They hurled anything they could find -- rocks, bricks, even Baum's barbecue grill -- and pounded the 49-year-old with a pipe and with the baseball bat he kept at his campsite for protection.
Ihrcke smeared his own feces on Baum's face before cutting him with a knife "to see if he was alive," Moore said.
After destroying Baum's camp, the boys left the homeless man -- head wedged in his own grill -- under a piece of plastic where they hoped the "animals would eat" him.
Then, Moore says, they took off to grab a bite at McDonald's.
This is not just a humanity issue--these kids should have known better than to beat and kill the homeless, if nothing else for the sheer fact that the homeless are people. The issue becomes a disability issue when it is considered that "disability precipitates and prolongs homelessness" (source).
There is increasing awareness of the role of medical impairment and disability in precipitating and prolonging homelessness. The fact that people with disabilities constitute the “chronically homeless” population in America is extremely troubling. Any national strategy to end and prevent homelessness must include adequate financial supports to enable persons with disabilities which limit their capacity to earn sufficient income through employment to secure housing and meet other basic needs, including health care.
2 comments:
We are getting out of these children what goes into them. It makes me sick.
Having been made homeless be disability for many years, I know just how hard it is to rebuild a life and get off the streets. The level of misinformation lack of services in the United States is beyond believing. True there are many causes that contribute to this problem, but being seen as sub-human is a big one, even to those of us who were part of the invisible homeless those who lived in cars or RV's taking care to look as normal as possible, we all lived in fear of attack. It has made me question if the core of this country has gone rotten. But given whats going on in the world the biggest resource thats in short supply is compassion.
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