This archive report was first published on 26 September 2019.
On September 12, 2019, a 64-year-old homeless man was sleeping under a pile of cardboard boxes in downtown Glendale, California, when another homeless individual approached and lit the cardboard on fire. The victim, who was not injured, scrambled to put out the flames with bottled water but was unsuccessful.
Surveillance cameras captured the incident, and the police arrested a suspect, Richard Smallets, 32, in a nearby park hours later. Smallets was charged with attempted murder and arson of an inhabited structure or property and is being held with bail set at $1 million.
The attack occurred in the same week that a burned body was found at a homeless encampment in nearby Van Nuys, and after a series of fire-related attacks on homeless people in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Times reported that on August 25, a fire set by two men who targeted an encampment became a 45-acre brush fire, and the next night, a beloved musician was killed when someone set fire to his tent in downtown Los Angeles.
Shayla Myers, a senior attorney at the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, said the attacks had sowed fear among her clients. 'When folks are unhoused they're vulnerable to all sorts of things, whether it's the weather, violence, or criminalization and incarceration as a result of the fact that they're unhoused,' Myers said.
California houses 12 percent of the population of the United States, but about half of the country's unsheltered homeless live there. Analysts blame the ratio on a lack of affordable housing and strict building regulations. The most recent count of homeless people in Los Angeles County, released in June, found that homelessness was up by 12 percent over the last year, with nearly 59,000 people, about 44,000 of whom were unsheltered.
