The year prior, a homeless man at the Teichert Ponds camp was shot and killed and another injured by two teens. The Eaton-Cohasset encampment is a City-designated site where unhoused people who haven’t found or accepted other shelter can be referred. A few minutes later, a compact car passed with the passengers shouting profanities (and releasing) high-powered automatic pellet fire,” residents told Withuhn. “In the early evening, before dark, a police car would go by.
Charles Withuhn with the North State Shelter Team, which provides mobile showers to Chico’s unhoused, says four people were hit in those incidents.
On several occasions last October and into November, the two dozen or so people who live here were sprayed with air-gun pellets fired from a passing vehicle. “He drove by three times yesterday.”įor camp residents the threats feel all too real. A native of Paradise, about 12 miles east of Chico, Jimbo - he declined to give his last name - is among the thousands who were left homeless by the 2018 Camp Fire that devastated the region.
“There’s some guy who drives around with a loudspeaker and a mask on saying, ‘Get out of Chico or get killed,’” says Jimbo Slice, 29. With hate crimes targeting racial, religious, and sexual minorities on the rise nationwide, residents here say they’re being targeted for another reason: because they’re homeless.
