Officer Kara Barnhardt@@all named checked on documents of court case (Branden had them)@@ was simply performing her duties when she took Robin Irish’s@@same document@@ beer from his hand in March of 2004. The gesture, although routine for Barnhardt, prompted Irish to strike the officer in the face, knocking her down. He promptly stepped over her and repeatedly punched her until a homeless man spotted the assault, ran over and pulled Irish off Barnhardt.
Irish, approximately 6-foot-3 and 230 pounds, was sentenced to 13 months in prison and 36 months probation after his assault on Officer Barnhardt.
This wasn’t the first time that Irish has run into trouble with the law — his crimes date back to 1981, including one case of arson in the first degree.
Gary Prather@@same document@@, a known friend of Irish, has approximately 950 entries in 28 years of living in Eugene. Of those 950 entries, her was a victim in nearly 30 of them. Most notably, Prather did four and a half years in prison for a bias-motivated crime when he assaulted two lesbian women behind a church on 14th and Pearl.
Both Irish and Prather also have something in common other than a felony – they are both homeless men in the West University Neighborhood.
“All of the students think that they are just harmless homeless people,” Eugene police officer Randy Ellis @@http://kezi.com/page/221815@@said. “They aren’t harmless homeless. 95 percent of them have serious criminal records. I do the research on them.”
Deborah Healey@@http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1370555895@@, an owner-occupier in the West University Neighborhood and a senior instructor at the University’s American English institute@@http://aei.uoregon.edu/@@, sees the homeless population in the neighborhood as mostly a group of misfortune. But she believes the ones who have the chance to prey on their surroundings will.
“There is a cluster of those who are most likely to do the major crime,” Healey said. “If the door is unlocked, or the window is cracked, then the tweaker @@http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tweaker@@will come in and grab whatever they can.”
Wesley Eugene Nelson@@AHHHHH!!!!! http://mugshots.com/US-Counties/Utah/Salt-Lake-County-UT/Wesley-Eugene-Nelson.html@@, another homeless man with a criminal record, is new to the city of Eugene. The only reason Ellis knows about him is because he was disturbing the peace at a local 7-Eleven about can refunds. After looking into his file, Ellis found that in less than a year, Nelson has accumulated 40 entries into the Eugene Police Department database with crimes such as criminal trespassing and menacing with a knife. Deeper research revealed that Nelson has police records in four states with crimes such as unlawful entrance into an occupied dwelling, assault and felony assault on an officer.
“He looks like every other bum on the street — mismatched shoes, dirty old jacket, scraggly beard and dirty clothes,” Ellis said. “If you saw this guy, and he asked you for a cigarette or a buck, you would want to give it to him because you felt bad.”
It doesn’t frighten Healey, who has lived in the neighborhood since 1993, to know that dangerous people walk the streets around her house. But she noted that she takes the necessary precautions in order to secure a feeling of safety.
“We have deadbolts on every door, and we sleep with the deadbolts on. We are very careful with not leaving the windows open,” she said. “Basically, we’re very careful with good reason.”
Part of that reason is the fact that many of the criminals committing crimes are often caught and released. According to Aaron Rauschert@@http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Case+suspended.-a0135676574@@, the Sheriff Department’s parole and probation supervisor, his office is not supervising misdemeanors anymore because of budget cuts.
“A lot of people are being sentenced straight to probation,” Rauschert said, noting that the most serious criminals are put into jail, but the misdemeanors are being sentenced to court probation rather than supervised probation, and these infractions include property crimes and domestic violence.
Ellis confirmed the report. He explained that repeat criminals are being arrested and put back on the street within a couple of days, even if their sentence was for a couple of weeks. The “middle criminals,” as he called them, are only incarcerated when they have committed multiple crimes within a short period of time.
“It’s a system that’s been forced to make due with a broken system,” Ellis said.