“Hated Just for Being Homeless”

Fred “Freddy” F. De La Rosa. Photo by Peter Maiden

In the early morning of Aug. 26, while he was sound asleep in front of Cuca’s Mexican Restaurant on Olive Avenue in the Tower District, an unhoused 47-year-old Latino, Fred “Freddy” F. De La Rosa, was viciously attacked and kicked to the head suddenly by a passerby holding a hot dog in each hand.

The video surveillance footage of the attack is brutal and disturbing.

Yet, ultimately, it was this ghastly footage, along with a $2,000 Valley Crime Stoppers award, that helped a detective, Guadalupe Olague, and his team solve the case. The team is with the Fresno Police Department’s (FPD) Street Violence Bureau. They apprehended 25-year-old Roberto Felipe Olivera, who was arrested in late September and booked on a felony assault charge for his unprovoked vicious attack on De La Rosa.

Olivera evaded authorities for several weeks before his family helped coordinate his peaceful surrender.

What Olivera did to De La Rosa, however, wasn’t so peaceful.

“Waking up in the hospital was the scary part,” De La Rosa recounts. “It’s traumatizing. You see it in the movies all the time, but you don’t expect that to happen to you.

“When I woke up, I woke up to a bed that was drenched in my blood.”

Surprisingly, De La Rosa harbors no ill will for Olivera. “I [would] like to say I’m not mad at the person,” De La Rosa confesses.

“I’m not mad at this person who did this—in any way. I forgave this person when I woke up…But, I just don’t know what would possess someone to do this to somebody—it’s scary.”

Yes, it is scary. Especially in light of a similar story in Redding during the summer where a homeless man was bludgeoned with a baseball bat while he was asleep outside on a sofa. That poor man died.

Fortunately, De La Rosa survived. If his fellow unhoused friends had not called 911 when they did, he might not have. By all accounts, the emergency response was quick and the police and detective work in this case was solid.

FPD Deputy Chief Mark Salazar commended the Street Violence Bureau team on its strategic approach and efficiency.

“Incredible to watch,” said Salazar. “And the help received…from other detectives was incredible to watch from where I sit. Seeing them check businesses, canvass day and night, and do the technical aspect of the job like writing and serving search warrants.”

This case involves a violent attack on a resident. But not only that. It is about a privileged, housed man feeling completely justified with brutally stomping the head of another less privileged man experiencing homelessness while sleeping in public. This case is about how the public treats the homeless.

A couple of years ago back in the Tower District, there was another brutal attack. That was deemed a hate crime because it was an attack against a federally protected group of people (in that case, LGBTQ+). Attacks on the unhoused are not considered federally protected. Unless a crime is clearly carried out because of race/ethnicity, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender/sex, gender identity or disability, it is not a hate crime. Housing status is not considered a protected category, unfortunately.

“I went to sleep right outside of Cuca’s because it’s all lit up at night and I felt safe there,” De La Rosa recalls. “Directly across the street, there’s a lot of drug use that goes on. So, I figured I’d stay there [in front of Cuca’s] because my family knows them [the owners of Cuca’s] and I’ve known them for many years. So, I slept there.”

Yet not everyone wants De La Rosa sleeping in front of their businesses or on the street. Both the City and County of Fresno have new legislation that restricts options for the homeless. Sleeping in front of a business or elsewhere in the city can get you cited for $1,000. You could even be arrested. The county isn’t much better with a fine of $500.

Bob McCloskey, a local advocate for unhoused residents, explains the significance of the new ordinances. “There will be profiling of the poor, there’ll be profiling of those who are out on the streets. The disabled, the elderly that are out there will be profiled, and they very well could be ticketed with a thousand dollar fine and arrested simply for being in a park.

“We could be profiled and ticketed and even arrested for listening to music on a park bench. But what it really does is give the police discretion on who to identify as poor and homeless.” Laws targeting the unhoused ultimately target everyone.

The path for the city and county updates to homeless legislation was paved by Governor Newsom, who is encouraging municipalities to “clean up” their “homeless problem.” Newsom recently said about the progress: “So what gives? Time to do your job. Time to address the crisis of encampments on the streets in this state…I’m not going to fund the rhetoric of failure anymore.”

With this impetus and sense of urgency, life is about to get even harder for those experiencing homelessness in the Golden State. Fresno Mayor Jerry Dyer says that “regardless of the availability of bed space in this community, we will hold our unsheltered population accountable and that could and will include arresting and taking them to jail if in fact they are in violation of the ordinance.”

Nationally, a recent judicial decision has allowed and empowered states and municipalities to essentially criminalize their unhoused residents.

“The Supreme Court made a ruling on June 28, in a 6-3 decision, that allows cities like Fresno to basically punish people for sleeping…for lying outside, even if there are no alternatives and no shelter space available,” explains McCloskey. “The city of Fresno is one of the first to do this in the country.”

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, one of the dissenting judges, said of the ruling: “Either stay awake or be arrested.”

If the public stereotypes unhoused residents as criminals for simply existing in public, then housed residents might feel empowered to attack them with impunity, as in what Olivera did to De La Rosa.

“We believe the City Council and the mayor and their decision-making process to criminalize the unhoused folks of Fresno has led to these kinds of violent attacks,” adds McCloskey. “It’s led to basic dehumanization, and in some cases, hatred of those who are unfortunate enough to be unhoused.”

McCloskey wants to be hopeful, but it is hard for the homeless. “The community doesn’t seem to care very much about the suffering that’s going on out there.

“The small businesses and the people of Fresno, they don’t want to look for solutions for the homeless other than ‘make them disappear.’”

De La Rosa mentioned two important community figures who have been especially helpful to him since the attack, Chaplains Don Gable and Shad Sanders, associated with the Fresno Probation Department.

“I met these guys on the street…they come and feed us pizza and pray for us,” De La Rosa recounts.

“Pizza and prayer,” says Sanders. “We’ve been doing this for some 12 years now. And people do show up—about 75 to 80 people every Friday.”

Recently, the City fined their little ministry, saying it is a magnet for the homeless. Gable says that they have been accused of “bringing the homeless in.” He explains how they ultimately got a citation and how the FPD sent out four police officers with undercovers and code agents. “They made it a really big deal. It didn’t feel good at all.”

“I feel helpless,” De La Rosa says. “I feel hated just for being homeless.”

Gable describes the frustration: “Back in June, we were told that they had a lot of events going on that month [because of Pride] and that they just didn’t want this kind of group of people around Tower at that time. What an interesting key phrase, I thought—tolerance and acceptance. That’s what we’re all marching about and promoting right now. I’m all for it, but it should be all inclusive—even for these people.”

“There’s a lot of hurting people in Fresno, for sure,” notes Sanders.

“Fred’s been clean and sober for a few months now,” Sanders says, “and he’s staying in a local recovery home—the Strong House—and he’s been giving back too, he’s out feeding and working with the homeless. He’s a success story to the homeless.”

“Fred’s a perfect example,” Gable says. “He believes, but he’s in a bad situation. And then he goes through an even more horrific situation, but he comes out of that in a lot of positive ways. And his attitude has been phenomenal.

“You know, you can teach and preach ‘love your enemy’ all day, and then you see somebody actually doing it and it’s like, ‘that’s the deal right there.’”

“Agape love,” De La Rosa utters.

“Yes, agape love,” Gable agrees. Unconditional love.

“Fred is showing all of us that it’s a matter of love at the end of the day; it’s still a matter of love,” Gable concludes. “We’ve been told before that we’re just a ‘hand-out,’ but actually, I believe we are a ‘hand-up,’ but more importantly, an ‘arm-around.’”

As of the most recent point-in-time count in 2023, there are about 3,200 homeless residents in the city of Fresno and 1,800 of those are unsheltered.

“I worry about the guy,” De La Rosa says of Olivera, his attacker. “Whatever is hurting this person, snap out of it, dude. You hurt a guy who would have helped you. And I wouldn’t stop at anything, I would keep helping you.

“Violence is temporary. And I’m not the enemy.”

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