1,765 words

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I have no doubt it’s painful to hear that a John Deere tractor with a pull-behind lawnmower gobbled up your homeless daughter . . . sorry, unhoused daughter . . . excuse me, daughter experiencing homelessness . . . and spat her out in chunks.

But that’s what happened to 27-year-old Christine Chavez on July 8 at Beard Brook Park in Modesto, California as the result of a “gruesome lawnmower mishap.”

For four years up until this month, the City of Modesto had allowed the park to be used as a homeless encampment. A statement issued by the E & J Gallo Winery — Modesto’s largest employer — says the vintners had purchased the park from the city the day before Chavez’s death and that a contractor was trying to do some basic cleanup work:

Gallo acquired the Beard Brook Park property in Modesto on Friday, July 7, 2023. . . . On Saturday, July 8, 2023, a landscaping contractor was hired to perform weed abatement and fire prevention services. . . . There was an accident at approximately 12pm involving the contractor’s tractor and an individual who was not visible and laying in a tall, weeded area. The contractor immediately contacted the Modesto Police Department. . . .

According to multiple accounts — including a GoFundMe page her sister started in the wake of her death — Chavez had been “sleeping” at around noon at the park in the central California town where the average high temperature in July is 95 degrees. Since none of the people alleging she was asleep were there at the time of her tragic encounter with the power mower, it’s unclear why they are so certain she was asleep.

One would assume that a motorized tractor with a pull-behind mower gets pretty loud. One also wonders not only how someone is able to sleep in a public park at noon on a midsummer day amid a tractor’s grinding industrial sounds, but why they were sleeping there in the first place.

The Modesto Bee reports that Christine Chavez came from a “close-knit family.” At the time of her death, Chavez left behind a nine-year-old daughter who was apparently being cared for by Chavez’s mother nearly 600 miles away in Yuma, Arizona.

Most of the deceased’s “close-knit” family members allegedly still live in Arizona, but Chavez’s father Cristobal moved to Modesto about five years ago. About three years ago, apparently leaving what was then her six-year-old daughter behind in Arizona, Christine Chavez “moved to Modesto to be closer to her father and would check in regularly for food, clothing and other necessities. They said she would stay at home a couple days and leave again.”

Her father says that the police contacted him after finding and identifying her remains in the park. He says he visited the site of her death, and that

There were many pieces of [her remains] around there and I called the police. . . . I went there and I still have pieces of bones, like pieces of her skull and some teeth. It’s terrible.

He also says he doesn’t believe Modesto Police spokeswoman Sharon Bear’s account that the tractor driver, who is still unnamed, “noticed a body in the grass he had already made a pass through”:

It’s a lie that they didn’t see her. . . . I’m going to keep going because I need to. I’m looking for justice and I’m going to be there until something happens.

Mr. Chavez didn’t specify exactly what would comprise “justice,” but it’s a word that other family members keep using.

“I am sad for what happened to my daughter, and we want justice for the way that she died,” says Chavez’s mother Josefina.

The GoFundMe page that Chavez’s sister Esmerelda started is called “Justice for Christine”:

I am doing this fundraiser to make Justice for my sister because while she was in the park sleeping a lawnmower tractor run [sic] over my little sister while she was sleeping. Destroyed her body and everything. . . . My dad went to the scene when the police cars were gone. There he would find pieces of my sister’s skull with hair still on the floor [sic] and bones with chopped skin. . . . So I’m asking help so we could be able to pay for a lawyer to fight this case and beat it. . . . Please help to get Justice for Christine. . . . She was a beautiful mother she lived [left?] behind her 9 year old [sic] she loved her with all her heart.

Chavez’s 33-year-old brother Randy, who still lives in Arizona, says that his sister would often stay at a Salvation Army shelter about a block from Beard Brook Park:

She was a free soul. She was a great and pure soul and she made a lot of jokes. . . . She was always such a little prankster, she was goofy. We loved that about her personality. . . . She didn’t deserve that for that reason, for being homeless. My sister was loved. The only thing she wanted was to be free.

Free of what? Obligations? Since I have not heard the merest suggestion that Christine Chavez was employed, paid taxes, or helped to financially support her nine-year-old daughter or herself, it’s hard not to suspect that she only wanted to live for free. Family members insist that Christine was not a drug addict. They have insinuated she was “experiencing mental health challenges in recent years and often chose to stay outdoors.”

Although a county coroner says it will be “several weeks” before a final cause of death will be revealed via an autopsy, members of Chavez’s family are already demanding a second autopsy.

Nearly five years ago, 32-year-old Shannon Bigley — described as a “‘flower child’ with a roller-coaster life” — was crushed to death in Modesto by a Caltrans employee while Bigley was “sleeping inside what the equipment operator thought was an unoccupied pile of trash.”

Apparently, being a flower child with a roller-coaster life can be risky.

Although it remains unclear whether or not Christine Chavez was visible to the tractor driver until after he spotted her remains in the wake of his path, Dez Martinez, a member of a homeless advocacy group called “We Are Not Invisible,” chided members of the Modesto city council about the agony that Christine’s father is currently enduring:

He doesn’t get to see his daughter. You guys get to kiss your kids goodnight. If you buried them, you get to see them. He does not. . . .

It’s a mystery why Martinez seems to think that city council members are somehow responsible for Chavez’s death, but what seems obvious is that Christine’s father would have been able to kiss his daughter goodnight every night if Christine hadn’t made the choice to be “free” and live out on the streets.

An e-mail from Lynelle Solomon, a member of Modesto Community Action Group, alleges that “Christy could have still been alive today, had she had a safe place to rest. . . .” But apparently she had at least two safe places to rest: Her father’s house and the Salvation Army shelter that was only a block away from the site of her demise. She allegedly chose not to stay at her father’s house. And even though she was not employed or involved in any demanding physical pursuits of any kind, she had the freedom to lie down in a public park at noon on a summer’s day.

The other night, purely as a result of the algorithms that YouTube uses to pick movies for me based on what I’ve previously watched, I caught a dark little 1957 film called The Night Runner. The film is a cautionary tale about how mental hospitals, due to overcrowding, were letting people back out onto the streets far too soon for their own safety as well as the public’s. There’s a scene where the main character, an impeccably groomed man wearing a suit and tie, is walking with a suitcase somewhere along the Pacific Coast Highway just north of Los Angeles, which causes a cop to turn around and ask him for identification. Since the character, a recently-released mental patient with a violent history, was able to provide identification, the cop let him go. It might have been a mistake, as the man winds up killing the proprietor of the beach cottage he rented for a week.

It occurred to me that when I was a kid, there was no such thing as “homeless people,” much less “unhoused people,” or, for heaven’s sake, “people experiencing homelessness.” There were winos, bums, hobos, and vagrants, though, and there was a heavy public stigma attached to such people. Before that, there were workhouses and debtor’s prisons.

I’m not implying I know the answer to this grimly complicated situation. I suspect that the debtors’ prisons of centuries past and the insane asylums of the 1900s were cruel, brutal, and inhumane places. Then again, having to walk through homeless tent camps on your way to work is cruel, brutal, and inhumane to the people who still have to work to feed themselves.

The hopelessly fractured and impossibly diverse United States is no longer a “society” in any meaningful sense; it’s nothing more than a cynical financial scheme posing as a nation.

I suspect that technology may soon render nearly all work — and by extension, the value of nearly all humans as economic commodities — obsolete, so very few of us have the moral high ground to keep sneering at those above and below us forever, because a grim and hopeless form of perpetual vagrancy may be in all of our futures.

But is it possible that in July 2023, Christine Chavez’s main problem was that she had too much freedom?

A 2022 essay that attempts to bust some myths and facts about homelessness contains the following passage:

Myth: Homeless people are lazy.

Fact: To survive, many people who experience homelessness are constantly searching for necessities, such as food, shelter, and a source of income. People experiencing homelessness don’t have the luxury of being lazy. They are in survival mode.

I’ve been in survival mode all of my adult life, except for one cold Pennsylvania night in the early 1980s when I slept in my Pontiac LeMans after my mother kicked me out of the house for good at age 19, I’ve never been homeless. I’ve been too busy working to feed and house myself. Maybe it’s a flaw and maybe it’s a virtue, but I’d feel like a leech and a creep if I depended on others for food and shelter. Saddled with a conscience about such things, I’ve never had the luxury of being lazy.

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