The second part of my tale on going homeless for a night comes out Sunday. But that won’t be the end of it for me. I meant to try to keep the momentum going by helping our local homeless folks, but now I’m even more convinced I want to stay engaged in the cause after the torrent of feedback I received.

I’ve gotten so many calls and e-mails reacting to the piece. Most of them were positive, including one about a woman who works at a coffee shop who often befriends the homeless near the store. I’m going to follow up with her next week. I’m so eager to tell you that story because it’ll hearten even the most cynical of you out there.

I even got a complimentary e-mail from Mark, a homeless man who camps around the area. He’s really web-savvy and uses a computer at one of the local libraries to keep up with his correspondence. I had coffee with him today in our cafeteria after he rode his bike over here. It was pretty weird to have to go out to the security gate ahead of time this morning to give our guards a heads up. I wouldn’t blame them if they wondered about a homeless guy on a bike asking to see me. The guards, of course, were professional.

Mark and I talked for awhile as I tried to get his story, but it was really difficult as he has a tendency to jump around in the narrative. I felt like a passenger in a car regularly grabbing the steering wheel to get us back on track. From what I could determine he was getting by OK, living in a trailer in the Chicago suburbs, not far from where I grew up, but he really messed up his foot in an accident — not long after getting electrocuted on one job — and he fell into an unfortunate heroin habit to cope with the pain so he could keep going to work. Eventually, he tried doing methadone instead.

But what probably drove him to homeless, he said, was a beat-down from a cop. He says he was “dancing” on a guardrail along a busy thoroughfare. He had just gotten back from the doctor and for the first time in a long time he didn’t feel any pain and was finally getting ready to go back to work after a long absence (he insists he wasn’t drunk or high and was also addiction-free at the time). Then the cop told him to get down from the guardrail. He said OK and started heading to his home nearby. Next thing he knew he was tackled, beaten and while lying on the ground, handcuffed, some other cops showed up and one of them shot him in the butt with a taser. I have no way of verifying all this, but he showed me several documents and repeatedly insisted, “I can document all this.”

I wouldn’t dismiss it out of hand, although I’m sure the cops would have a different version of the story. Still, I was reminded when, about the same time he says he was attacked, officers from that same police department shot and killed someone in what appeared to me was a blatant case of brutality.

I was working the overnight shift at City News Bureau and one of the chores was to pick up the list of deceased from the medical examiner’s office. Before I started this shift I was warned, “When they say bring doughnuts, be sure to do it. Some guys refuse and they get totally shut out. They mean it.” So I stopped by Dunkin’ Donuts and got them their damned breakfast. I ain’t stupid. I grew up in Chicago. I know how the city “works.” They were ecstatic that their new overnight reporter “got it.” Anyway, it did pay off on more than one occasion. One morning I went in there and was told, “I can’t tell you about this one, but it’s news. Check it out.”

The whole point of checking the “stiff list” (as we called it in typical gallows humor) was to find out if somebody died in a newsworthy way. Most of the time, though, they died innocuous enough deaths. Most of the bodies that end up at the medical examiner’s office are drug overdoses. We called it “cheaping them out.” As soon as we deemed the death “too cheap” to be news, we crossed them off. Well, it turns out the county hack who gave me the heads up wasn’t lying. It was an officer-involved shooting. And on a Sunday morning like that it was a story destined to lead off the afternoon and 10 o’clock newscasts. I tried calling the cops for some time because, frustratingly, I couldn’t even determine where the shooting took place. I called the fire department and they told me where they sent the ambulance, so I used a reverse directory to get a phone number for the house. I called, begged forgiveness for calling at such a troubling time and then explained that the cops were non-responsive and I needed to find out what happened.

“It doesn’t surprise me they won’t talk to you,” the woman said.

“Why’s that?” I asked, not knowing yet it was an officer-involved shooting. For all I knew it could have been a real low-threshhold gang shooting that none of our clients would care about.

“That’s because they killed him,” she said, shaking with a rage that I could clearly sense.

She acknowledged that her brother was very high on drugs and was acting bizarrely enough that they called the police, fully expecting like anyone would that they would come to help. All they wanted was for a professional to take him to the hospital or some place where they could calm him down. When the cops got there, the man tried to hold them at bay with — I’ll never forget this — a can of creamed corn. So they shot and killed him.

“What did they think he would do? Throw it at them? Then what?” she asked angrily.

Of course it wasn’t a deadly weapon unless we’re talking about Jackie Chan here or something. Anyway, I tried calling back the cops to give them a chance to respond. Nope, they said, and hung up on me. I was steaming. The next day since it was back to regular business hours I called the chief and the public information officer. No response still. So I called the county prosecutors. Would there be some sort of investigation? Nothing again. Finally, my boss had to convince me to let it go. You can’t win ’em all. We put the news out there and did our best. Inexplicably, it didn’t even make the newscasts from what I recall. No one cared.

So I’ll keep an open mind on Mark’s story.

Then this afternoon the common-law husband of the “pro surfing legend” woman I wrote about in last week’s piece on homelessness called. First they stopped in our satellite office and found out neither Brady Rhoades nor I were there.

Right then when he called it was turmoil central here as breaking news jumped like popcorn in an uncovered skillet. The OC archdiocese settled its lawsuit with a man who sued after he said he was molested by a priest, the verdict of death came in from the John Fitzgerald Kennedy trial, and there was a shooting in the Kmart parking lot on Harbor. Mike called me just as I was trying to post the shooting story on our website. He said he was looking for “Bradley,” and it took me awhile to realize he was talking about Brady. I told him he was gone for the day, but he verbally ran right over me and angrily said, “You tell Anderson he’s no psychiatrist and he can’t call my wife delusional… she won 28 tournaments all over the world and her father was a Hollywood director…” repeating what his wife told me two weeks ago. The problem, as I have explained, was I couldn’t verify any of it. And I’m telling you I tried. I called local surfing experts and checked every database I could think of online and could not substantiate any of it. I have no way of knowing whether she’s telling the truth and was robbed of credit, but I just tried to explain what I knew. He didn’t realize he was talking to me when he railed against “Anderson,” and I thought of telling him it was me, but I decided against it because, unfortunately, I needed to tend to the breaking news. I just didn’t have time to argue with him. Then the conversation took a really bizarre turn when he insisted I tell Brady to send a “skirt” over to re-interview his wife and “do the story right this time,” implying this would mollify them and they wouldn’t sue.

“Don’t send that Anderson over. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. Send a skirt over here,” he said. At first I thought I misheard him but he repeated it a few times. Why a “skirt?” I’m still wondering. Maybe he figured a woman would be more understanding?

At any rate, I just felt awful when I realized I couldn’t verify her story. Trust me, I wanted it to be true. What a fantastic story if true. A better story, in fact. I even consulted with the Lighthouse pastor on this and we agreed it would probably be best if I just left her unnamed in the story as her nickname would have singled her out more. I’m sorry that they got so upset, and I can’t blame them, but the hell of being a reporter sometimes is you have to tell the truth — you have to tell it like it is. I can only write what I know.

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