News and Press

'Dumping' of homeless alleged
January 28, 2006
Ben Baeder, Whittier Daily News

West Covina - Citrus Valley Health Partners hospitals have hired taxis to drop off injured or ailing homeless people at local churches, according to area homeless-assistance volunteers.

One paraplegic man was "dumped off by a taxi" at St. Dorothy Catholic Church in Glendora, said Irene Kubo, executive director of the East San Gabriel Valley Coalition for the Homeless.

"He was in a hospital gown, with bare feet," Kubo said. "He was freezing. He couldn't walk. His leg was bleeding badly."

The coalition runs a cold-weather shelter that rotates to different churches in the Valley and is now at St. Dorothy's.

Kubo said three times in the past 10 days, patients - two of whom seemed to need immediate medical care - have been dropped off by taxis at area churches.

Citrus Valley spokeswoman Catherine Koetters said privacy laws prohibited her from discussing specifics of a medical case, but said no hospitals in the group would release a patient incapable of caring for himself.

"We never discharge a patient without a doctor's permission," she said, adding that doctors at the hospital have information that homeless advocacy workers do not.

She said anyone who seemed unable to survive alone in society would not be released and would be tended to by hospital social services workers.

Citrus Valley Health Partners operates Queen of the Valley Campus and Citrus Valley Hospice in West Covina, Inter-Community Hospital in Covina and Foothill Presbyterian Hospital in Glendora.

Bob McKennon, a homeless-coalition volunteer who lives in Hacienda Heights, said he is sure a taxi departing the Queen of the Valley campus dropped off a groggy, cut and bruised man at St. Dorothy's on Jan. 22. He said the taxi drivers told staff there where the people were being transported from.

The bruised man -whose name McKennon never learned - could barely talk, but volunteers think he was saying he had been hit by a car, McKennon said.

"It certainly looked like that could have been the case," he said. "He had cuts on his legs and a big lump on his head. His leg was bleeding. He couldn't walk at all."

Volunteers carried the man into a room at the church and cleaned up his leg wound, McKennon said, and added that the man was wearing a hospital gown and had no shoes, so workers got him some clothes.

The shelter workers that night called an ambulance to take the injured man and another man with diabetes to Foothill Presbyterian for treatment.

The next day, the two were dropped off by a taxi at St. John Vianney Catholic Church in Hacienda Heights, McKennon said, but the homeless shelter was not operating there. That church is about a 25-minute drive from the shelter in Glendora, he said.

Once again, according to McKennon, the paraplegic man wore only a hospital gown when he and the other man were found at about 4:15 p.m. by a parishioner. The injured man's bandages had not been changed, workers said.

"As far as we can tell, they had been sitting out there all day," McKennon said. Workers picked up the men and took them to St. Dorothy Church.

McKennon said he eventually helped the paraplegic man be admitted to Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center.

Two days later another taxi, allegedly coming from Foothill, dropped off a man in a wheelchair at St. Dorothy's; the man seemed to be suffering from complications of a stroke, McKennon said. When the man wanted to use the restroom, volunteers had to carry him and set him on the toilet, McKennon said.

After making telephone calls, volunteers had the man admitted to a nearby long-term healthcare facility, McKennon said.