By Mark Ryavec
On April 8th of this year, around 4:30 AM, a transient living in Venice was crazy on drugs, yelling at the top of his lungs that “he has a gun,” on Horizon Avenue near Riviera.
Several residents were awakened by his loud ravings and called the police. The police did not respond, the police said, since it was just another drug addict acting out in Venice.
A young mother of two in a duplex was awakened and went down her stairs to investigate. She heard the transient yelling at the top of his lungs and then heard noises that she thought came from him fighting with someone in the street. As she descended her stairs she realized that he was trying to kick in her front door.
She called the police but they still would not send a squad car because he was outside.
She grabbed her 5 and 7 year old children and fled down the back stairway to her neighbor’s on the first floor. She and her children and her neighbor and the neighbor’s young children heard the transient yelling as he went up the stairs. Not being able to kick down the door, he had broken the glass plate in the top of the 100-year old door and dove through it, cutting himself extensively in the process. He was momentarily stopped by a child guard at the top of the stairway, but he got past it and proceeded to go into the young woman’s living room and then into the bathroom, which he demolished and in the process covered it in blood. He ripped both pedestal sinks off the wall, which the police later told the resident would have taken Herculean strength and indicated he was on probably PCP.
Quickly realizing that they were not safe downstairs, both single moms fled with their children to a neighbor’s across the street who offered them sanctuary.
From the time she called the police to the time they arrived, 25 minutes elapsed.
The police and emergency medical personnel surrounded the duplex and then entered the house. They found the transient fighting with a shower curtain on the floor of the bathroom, drenched in his own blood. It took six cops and EMTs to subdue him and carry him to a waiting ambulance.
The transient had a criminal record in Idaho. He is not from California. He is to be confined in a mental hospital for one year.
The young woman’s in-laws, who owned the property, sold it. The young woman has moved to a new residence that has three doors to pass through before one can enter the home.
She and her oldest daughter have PTSD and are both in counseling; the young woman could not sleep for the first month after the break-in.
This is the sixth home invasion in our small neighborhood that I know of since April.
And Traveling Mayor Eric, City Attorney Mike Feuer (AKA The Poodle), Councilman Bonin (AKA The Homeless Advocate) and Chief Charlie Beck (Well, we can’t arrest our way out of this mess in Venice) are doing precisely what to stop the next home invasion in Venice by transients that continue to be allowed to camp on Venice Beach, on 3rd Street and on Venice Boulevard?
