Two homeless women were mauled, one fatally, by pit bulls in San Bernardino on Thursday.
The attacks occurred proximate to the shantytown that formed along the chain-link fence barrier to East Twin Creek near Pacific Street and Perris Hill Park Road after city officials forcefully removed dozens of people who were living in Perris Hill Park in November 2024.
The dogs made a savage attack on the woman late in the afternoon on July 31. An emergency 911 call reporting the attack on one of the women was made around 5 p.m. and was patched through to the police department. Several units were dispatched to the scene.
The first of the officers to respond located one of the woman, believed to be the woman about whom the emergency call had been made. He summoned an ambulance and was attempting to tend to her wounds when two of the dogs that had been obscured by nearby vegetation emerged, moving quickly toward him.
The officer used his service firearm to shoot and kill one of the dogs, while the other scampered away.
Shortly thereafter, another woman, subsequently identified as 51-year-old Teodora Mendoza, was found nearby, with severe injuries to her face. She had lost a substantial amount of blood. She was transferred at once to St Bernardine Hospital, which was located roughly two-thirds of a mile away.
Despite the rendering of medical care, Mendoza succumbed to her injuries.
A series of events stretching back for more than a year and taking place at various locations, one as far as 2,610 miles away and another less than a mile distant, led to Mendoza’s demise.
On June 28, 2024 the U.S. Supreme Court’s entered a ruling in the case of the City of Grants Pass v. Johnson allowing local governments to be more ruthless in the way the homeless population is handled.
The Supreme Court’s final disposition of the City of Grants Pass v. Johnson matter essentially undid previous rulings in the 1962 case of Robinson v. California and the 2018 case Martin v. Boise.
In Robinson v. California, the Supreme Court held that the Eighth Amendment prohibits criminalization of a status, as opposed to criminalizing criminal acts, in striking down a California law that made being addicted to narcotics unlawful. By extension, this pertained to being homeless, such that it made applying traditional vagrancy laws difficult, problematic or even impossible. In this way, from that point on, at least until last year, an individual could not be prosecuted for being homeless.
In Martin v. Boise, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that city officials in Boise, Idaho could not enforce an anti-camping ordinance whenever its homeless population exceeds the number of available beds in its homeless shelters. The Ninth Circuit includes the nine western states and all of the Pacific Islands.
Both Robinson v. California and Martin v. Boise had the practical effect of preventing government in general and local governments in particular from declaring open warfare on the homeless. Whereas previously, before the Grants Pass vs. Johnson ruling, local officials had to walk a very fine line in evicting homeless from parks and other public areas, officials as of June 2024 have had a much freer hand in sending the homeless packing.
In the City of Grants Pass v. Johnson ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the punishments of fines, temporary bans from entering public property, and one-month jail sentences imposed by the City of Grants Pass on trespassers at its parks were neither cruel nor unusual and that that the Grants Pass’s anti-camping ordinances were neutrally applied against both the homeless and those who are not homeless. The upshot was that the Supreme Court held that local governments can ban the homeless from public areas.
This was of substantial significance in San Bernardino, where the homeless had established what was, for all intents and purposes, permanent residency there, living in tents or using other means such as sleeping bags laid out near the parks’ picnic tables to make it through the night and on to the next day and then the next and then the next.
The city first cleared the homeless from Secombe Lake Park and then Meadowbrook Park.
For years, city officials and many residents decried the homeless habitation of the parks, which many complained made city residents reluctant, unwilling and afraid to visit and make use of those amenities.
In October 2024, San Bernardino Mayor Helen Tran said the city would initiate the removal of homeless individuals from the Perris Hill Park as soon as it had two new homeless shelters in place. A month later, those shelters had yet to materialize, but officials impatient with the situation on Thursday, November 14, dispatched city employees, accompanied by police officers and employees of the Burrtec trash company, to begin forcefully evicting the remnants of the homeless population living in Perris Hill Park.
On that day, Mendoza was separated from the place she had for months off-and-on been calling home.
There were expressions of relief and accomplishment among a certain set of the city’s population over the homeless having been booted from the parks.
As an inducement to get many of the homeless to leave Perris Hill Park, officials offered them vouchers to stay at local motels or hotels. Based upon the Sentinel’s inquiries at the time, those dislodged from the park who accepted the offers of the vouchers were given respites from living under the stars for, in one case, three days, another for 10 days and a third for a week. A fourth person enjoyed a motel stay of eight days. Thereafter, all were again living under dire conditions in San Bernardino.
The homeless who left the parks took up lodging in areas nearby that proved as problematic as their presence in the parks. This included living in alleyways, abandoned buildings, in flood control channels, in and near riverbeds and creekbeds and under freeway overpasses.
Mendoza’s situation was not much different from those of others caught up in the inhumane conditions that come with living on the streets. Whereas previously, while she was among others while subsisting in Perris Hill Park, there would have been enough people in close proximity to her to, perhaps, have pulled a vicious dog that had locked its jaws onto her face, had such an attack occurred there. As it turned out, roughly a half-mile away from Perris Hill Park, in the area near Twin Creek where she had been reduced to dwelling on July 31, she found herself isolated just enough that when she had her final encounter with the dogs, there was no one there to save her.