Grim details emerge in death of California man killed during homeless sweep

New details have emerged in the death of a northern California man who was killed by a piece of excavating equipment during a city sweep of what officials have referred to as an illegal dumping site.

James Edward Oakley, a 58-year-old man who lived on the streets of Vallejo, was found dead at the site in the city last Christmas eve.

Initially, a city official told the Bay Area’s NBC affiliate that a public works crew had been using a backhoe to pick up “illegally dumped bags of construction material” when they came across the body, but did not say the backhoe was what killed him.

Two months later, the city confirmed that Oakley had been crushed to death and said that after investigating the matter, police found that the killing was accidental. The district attorney’s office said there was insufficient evidence to file criminal charges. But the city did not offer details about what led up to Oakley’s death and why crews didn’t tell him to leave the site before they began clearing it.

Now, KQED, the Bay Area’s NPR affiliate, has obtained the death investigation report, put together by a sheriff’s deputy, which includes new information about what unfolded and how the crew could have missed Oakley.

According to Jessica Dew, the sheriff’s deputy who was dispatched to the scene, the public works crew working on the sweep of the area saw a mattress covered with a tarp as well as tote bags and a shopping cart with bags of trash, KQED reported. The crew allegedly kicked at the mattress and called out to see whether anyone was there, but didn’t hear a response. They removed some items but left the tarp that had been on the mattress, according to the report. Another worker used the front bucket of the backhoe to compress the mattress and scooped it, along with Oakley, up.

When the worker began moving the mattress away, another worker saw a leg. Earlier in the day before the sweep, waste management workers said they had decided not to collect trash in the area after seeing a man at the site, KQED reported. Oakley was reportedly living there at the time.

Dew’s account comes amid calls for greater accountability and transparency from Vallejo officials, whom local organizers and members of the Vallejo and the wider Bay Area unhoused community say are trying to skirt past Oakley’s death without offering a full account of what occurred or proposals for how to avoid such killings in the future.

“James is a human being. There’s no investigation. They closed the investigation and I don’t know about you but it sounds criminal to me,” Shawn O’Malley, an organizer with Vallejo Homeless Union, said during an 11 March rally outside Vallejo’s city hall. “How many more bodies is it going to take? One’s too many.”

The event was organized by the community groups Vallejo Homeless Union, Poor magazine, and Mixed Kollective, who are calling for the city to partner with unhoused people to find solutions to homelessness in the city and ensure that if additional sweeps happen, they are done carefully to ensure that no one is injured or killed.

“He died because he was homeless, how do you miss that? There’s no amount of trash that’s going to justify them running over somebody with a backhoe … It’s like we don’t matter, but we do,” Kathleen McNeil, a founding member of Vallejo Homeless Union, told a reporter with Kron 4 News.

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Stephen Collopy

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