The Theft of Everyone’s Home: A Personal Account of the Fall of #FuerzaHernandez

https://www.facebook.com/laantieviction/posts/319995498104074

At 4:30 am om December 27, 2012, over 200 members of “Law Enforcement” , including some 50 LA county sheriffs deputies, and more than 150 lapd officers descended on 14620 Leadwell st. in Van Nuys. They brought with them the implied violence of firearms, armored vehicles, tear gas, and full riot gear, all to throw one family out into the street, ending the longest post-eviction foreclosure defense in California history. That morning, on Sherman way and Van Nuys blvd., one block away from the Hernandez home, a homeless woman was set on fire at the bus bench that had been her spot for years. Even though 200 sworn officers were just down the block, a civilian had to chase down the attacker, and hold him for 30 minutes till the police arrived, they were too busy with their plan to make more people homeless.

Even though we had known this moment was coming for the last 124 days, as the 30 of us were led into the chill of the early morning air, at gunpoint, past the seemingly endless lines of nervous cops equipped with shotguns and bulletproof vests, I could not help but be surprised at the extreme response to what had been an entirely peaceful protest. I shouldn't have been. Having been involved in many face to face confrontations with police on the streets of downtown LA, I should have been well aware that the first response of the reactionary monied class to any attempt by the people to enforce their basic human rights is to criminalize us, using the very agencies we pay for to deny us our rights, but still, the response was, in a word, overkill.

Despite the direct and obvious evidence of fraud on the part of Countrywide and BOA presented by the Hernandez family, both directly to the police and in court, our elected officials spent nearly half a million dollars in public money to harass and criminalize an innocent family, simply to evict them from a house with a market value of barely $260,000. I remember thinking, How, in a country where vacant homes outnumber homeless people 5 to 1, in a city where hundreds of thousands of people sleep on the streets every night, is this ridiculous waste of public funds even slightly justifiable?

The pigs finally shuffled us out from behind the police lines and into the parking lot of the Lucky's supermarket, which had recently closed down because of all the displacement in the area. Guadalupe Hernandez, who we had come to call Mama Lupe, stood on the sidewalk across Wynedote St. wrapped in a purple blanket, looking distraught, and shivering in the cold. Ulisses stood next to his mother, eyes fixed on the ground, the heat of his anger palpable in the early morning air, while Antonio and a few supporters mocked the police's ridiculous show of force on live stream. But it was the look on Javier Hernandez's face, that mixture of sorrow, guilt, and shock, as he took in the scene of his mother, brothers, and the rest of his newly adopted family, huddled with whatever meager possessions they had managed to save, that still haunts me to this day.

(More at the link.)