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Risking Your Life in the U.S. to Feed People
Driver Intentionally Plows Into Food Not Bombs Aid Effort, Killing One
By KEITH MCHENRY – Co-founder Food Not Bombs
On Monday, Reno Food Not Bombs volunteers Diamond and Clarissa Roman were helping a local woman select items from the clothing donations at the weekly meal when they were struck by a motorist. The three were rushed to the hospital where the woman seeking clothes, fifty-five-year-old Michelle Jardine, was pronounced dead. Diamond and Clarissa are in critical but stable condition according to hospital staff. Diamond arrived in the emergency room with a broken back. Clarissa’s condition upon arrival at the ER was significant. She had a broken clavicle, broken ankle, broken ribs, collapsed lung, and a brain bleed.
The driver, identified as David Turner, made statements to officers inferring that this incident was intentional. He faces one count of open murder and two counts of attempted murder.
Politicians and the media regularly dehumanize the homeless portraying those who are forced to live outside as criminals and mentally ill while passing laws they claim will “protect’ the public from the homeless and those who help them.
The city of Houston passed a law against the Food Not Bombs meal outside the main library and has been issuing tickets to the volunteers at every serving. Their first jury trial is set for June 1. Authorities in West Palm Beach, Florida recently introduced a local ordinance against their weekly meal. The City of Santa Cruz also passed a similar law last year seeking to limit our local Food Not Bombs group and threats to drive the meal off the Town Clock continue.
Santa Cruz city officials have coordinated with local anti-homeless vigilante groups like Take Back Santa Cruz and Santa Cruz Neighbors. Its members and allies encourage violence against the homeless while providing what officials call citizen support for their sweeps of homeless camps and the towing of vehicular homes.
The founder of Santa Cruz Neighbors and moderator of the Nextdoor.com in Santa Cruz is Deborah Elston. She is also a “volunteer" police officer, Badge # V502, and records show she has issued hundreds of tickets to the vehicles of homeless people often resulting in their shelter being towed forcing the occupants to move into a pup tent along the river or in a doorway downtown.
Nextdoor.com and local anti-homeless Facebook sites across the country spew a tirade of threats against the unhoused encouraging people to beat the homeless as they sleep or torch their tents.
In Santa Cruz, Brendon Edwards posted this on Facebook above a photo of a woman with a sign saying, “WANT ME TO KILL THEM?” He wrote, “Pro-Solution: Dress up like dirty hippies, pretend to be 'food not bombs,' poison the food you serve, come back to burn the dead, then Santa Cruz will be safe once again for young people with a well-paid job and a fashionable lifestyle.”
Driving attacks on the homeless are not limited to Reno. A man in a white pickup truck has driven at people during the Food Not Bombs meal in Santa Cruz several times in the last half year. Thankfully people were able to jump out of the path of the truck as it hopped the curb.
Take Back Santa Cruz treasurer Manuel Prado is the husband of Google’s chief council Halimah DeLaine Prado. According to emails we received under the public records act, he met regularly with Mayor Donna Meyers, City Manager Martin Bernal and other city council members to discuss efforts to criminalize the homeless. In one follow-up email Prado demands, “Enforcement of all parking rules (not just 72-hour limit) such as bald tires, leaking vehicles, missing license plates, cracked windshields, broken mirrors, etc.”
He adds: “-Update on what is being done to bring up the RV parking ban again with the coastal commission” and continues, "- Update on why some folks such as Keith McHenry (parked on McPherson) and Alicia Kuhl (parked on Delaware) have not been towed despite receiving so many tickets.” I don’t have any tickets on my car but this was not the case with Alicia because Prado had encouraged the police to target her and her young children and disabled husband; Deborah Elston complied. It will not be surprising to find out that he has regular meetings with Mayor Keeley.
Announcements of new anti-homeless policies are praised by hate groups flooding our local media with dehumanizing quotes by politicians and their supporters. In April 2021, the city used their proposed Temporary Outdoor Living Ordinance (TOLO) to enrage allies of Mayor Meyers and County Supervisor Ryan Coonerty starting yet another anti-homeless group Seabright Strong. They had used the same strategy a couple of years before ambushing Council member Drew Glover’s suggestion to review the 500 possible locations for safe sleeping when city staff chose Depot Park as a temporary camp knowing it would mobilize westside Santa Cruz against the homeless.
As hate swirls from the lips of city hall, the attacks on those portrayed as less than human marches on. This is how television station KSBW reported on the Sept. 30, 2022, assault on my soft spoken friend Max: “Two teenagers were arrested after they attacked a homeless man in Santa Cruz, police reported on Tuesday. Police say that a 53-year-old transient was involved in a fight with two teens in the area of Ocean St. and Glenwood Ave.” Max is one of the most gentle souls I have had the honor to know and he is not a “transient” having lived in Santa Cruz for decades. The teenagers video-taped their attack for social media. He was not “involved” in a fight.
Passing laws to “protect the public” from the homeless helps make it is acceptable to attack those who live outside.
In Reno, local television News 4 reported on Dec. 14, 2022, “Washoe County commissioners voted Tuesday to advance an ordinance banning non-recreational camping — a proposal requested by the sheriff to give his office more leeway to clean up homeless encampments in the unincorporated parts of the county.” The segment featured piles of trash and dehumanizing descriptions of people with no place to be. Violators would be guilty of a misdemeanor punishable by 6 months in jail and/or a fine of up to $500.
On March 20, Santa Cruz launched its new war on the homeless in the article, “In the Public Interest: A new law-and-order approach to homelessness in Santa Cruz?”
“The compassion meter of residents in the city is dropping like a stone when it comes to homelessness,” Keeley said. “It’s a different day in Santa Cruz now. It’s a different city council and a different administration.” As expected Keeley’s supporters followed with their letter to the editor campaign supporting the get tough on the homeless.
It was ironic to see that the writer opposing Mayor Keeley’s common-sense approach to homelessness is from Aptos. Most people actually living in Santa Cruz are indeed, as Mayor Keeley stated in so many words, fed up with the homelessness impacts on our downtown, our parks and open spaces. Keeley spent years working on the Community Advisory Committee on Homelessness so is well aware of these issues and ways to address them. Most of us appreciate his honest assessment of the situation.
"We are tired of Food Not Bombs flaunting laws that the rest of us have to follow and using the homelessness as a shield for his anarchist activities. We are tired of open-air drug dealing, theft and lawlessness downtown. We need a new approach. Thank you, Mayor Keeley, for talking about it honestly and taking steps to address these problems." - Steve McCarty
I attended all but one of the CACH meetings. Fred Keeley made it clear that the solution to homelessness was harsh law enforcement. This campaign of cruelty is well organized. Officials held a Safety meeting at the sheriff's office two days before the $50,000 Housing Matters April Fools Day March to End Homelessness officiated by the Mayor, followed by the Grand Reopening Celebration of San Lorenzo Park setting the stage for his another round of violence.
States across the country are preparing for the tidal wave of homeless Americans forced onto the streets by the crashing economic conditions. But instead of making plans to keep families in their homes they are introducing policies to intern the millions who will find themselves without a roof over their heads.
Tennessee was the first U.S. state to make it a felony to camp on public property. It was already illegal to sleep on private property and state property, and now public property has been added.
State Senators in California have introduced SB-31, “This bill would prohibit a person from sitting, lying, sleeping, or storing, using, maintaining, or placing personal property upon any street, sidewalk, or other public right-of-way within 1000 feet of a sensitive area, as defined. The bill would specify that a violation of this prohibition is a public nuisance that can be abated and prevented, as provided." The definition of "a sensitive area" is given as: "(2) “Sensitive area” means a school, daycare center, park, or library."
Food Not Bombs volunteers across the country are preparing for our nations slide into the next Great Depression and the state violence likely to accompany the madness.
The attack against the volunteers in Reno is not the only tragedy Food Not Bombs has faced this year. Officers from multiple agencies shot and killed Tallahassee Food Not Bombs volunteer Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, also known as Tortuguita, on Jan. 18, 2023, after authorities moved through the camp of peaceful activists who were in a forest to protest a planned $90m police training facility.
The Food Not Bombs community is saddened by the attack on our volunteers and those they were helping. A gofundme account was set up by our allies at Family Soup Mutual Aid. In true giving form, the Roman family has agreed to this fundraiser on the premise they will provide some burial assistance to the family of the woman who was killed in this tragedy.
Thankfully Mayor Keeley’s supporter Steve McCarty is wrong. Many people who live in Santa Cruz are compassionate and support those neighbors who have lost their housing. Unlike those driving this ugly inhumane plan to demonize the unhoused into their prison camps we have no access to the media or to the millions of dollars they have allocated to sweep clean the streets of “useless eaters.”
What we have is our love for our fellow human beings and a desire to stop this rush towards a totalitarian corporate dystopia.
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