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By the Daily Post staff
Palo Alto police said this afternoon that they’re investigating the death of a man who was injured in his home in the Buena Vista Mobile Home Park at 3980 El Camino Real.
Police dispatchers got a call on Monday (June 24) at 6:53 p.m. from a resident there who reported his roommate, a man in his 60s, was injured. Paramedics took the injured man to the hospital, where he died.
A press release from police did not state the manner of death or what caused the injury.
Police are collecting evidence and investigating.
“It is still too early to tell (but) we are not searching for any suspects,” said police spokeswoman Janine De la Vega.
The medical examiner has not yet released the man’s name.
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The police are lying. He was stabbed to death.
I realize the police are under a lot of pressure to portray BV as a peaceful place that’s home to hard-working, salt of the earth families who contribute to the community. But police have an obligation to truthfully report whether somebody was murdered there. Withholding information and engaging in a coverup will just make things worse for the police.
The man was murdered. His throat was slashed and he was gut-stabbed. Then the killer ran down the alley to his studio unit (in BV park) leaving a trail of blood drops.
The police interrogated the roommate for hours at a hotel trying to get him to admit that he did the killing. Then they left the hotel without saying boo to him. He went back to the trailer park but they couldn’t let him in because of the investigation. One cop gave him 6 bucks.
Although the police try and safeguard the integrity of investigations by withholding information, in this case it appears they are trying to preserve the image of Buena Vista now that it’s been rescued by the county and Palo Alto funds.
I mean, they wouldn’t even confirm it to be a homicide even with a blood trail leading the way. We’ve seen a few deaths at the trailer park, and even a suicide, but this is the first murder according to my boyfriend who is a 20-year resident of Buena Vista.
What a mess! What was the argument again for the City to buy this place?
It’s public housing now. Things change when housing goes from private ownership to a Housing Authority. Yes, there will be more crime. Think about how much crime there is in the inner city in public housing “projects”? By buying this mobile home park, it’s become a government “project” and there’s a lot of bad things that go along with this. Drugs, gangs, violence, guns. I’m sure this won’t be the last murder now that this is public housing.
If this had happened in the Crescent Park neighborhood or Downtown North, how fast would they have arrested the killer? I think the case would have been wrapped up by now.
1) Changing the ownership from private to government doesn’t automatically bring “bad things” to a community. That does not make logical sense. Disinvestment in communities (which is what happened in the public housing “projects” you refer to) is what causes the problems. Read “High-Risers: Cabrini-Green and the Fate of American Public Housing” to learn more about why public housing failed. Side note: the previous owner was abusive and predatory to the residents, and the change is ownership was very much needed for the community.
2) The undertone in many of the comments, including this one, is racist and classist — it’s essentially saying that low-income people are prone to drugs, gangs, violence, and guns. That is a stereotype our racist, implicitly biased society still needs to overcome.
3) If you ever set foot in Buena Vista, you would know that it’s a tight-knit, hardworking community and the descriptions you and others provide show that you either never set foot there, or your understanding of the community is constructed by biased sources, including others who have never set foot there. The fact that people are raging about this report’s lack of graphic content shows what kind of reporting our society has learned to automatically expect.
4) As members of the community, we can all grow and learn to be better neighbors. Rather than pointing fingers and making assumptions, let’s think critically and ask the right questions. Why do we see incidents of violence in certain pockets of our community? What are the root causes of this violence? Are people lacking access to healthcare and mental health treatment? How can we, as a community, ensure that Buena Vista continues to be the vibrant community that it is? Should we be asking our elected officials to invest more in the community, and ensure that it doesn’t become a run-down “project”? And most importantly, how can we fight to ensure that Palo Alto remains an inclusive community for ALL people, including low-income people? How can we continue to defend our community’s values of inclusion and diversity?
I don’t see the racism of the previous comments. Poor white people live in public housing too. Maybe the person complaining about racism is somebody who sees race in every situation, even when it isn’t an issue? The best policy in life is to be colorblind and treat people all the same, as Martin Luther King Jr. would have wanted us to do. Don’t make every situation, every comment, something racial when it isn’t.
And yes, public housing has a disproportionate amount of crime. It’s not because people of any one race live there.
“Former BV Resident” is a typical racist liberal. Liberals insert a racial motive into every incident. You can’t have a discussion about anything with such people before they begin accusing others of being racists.
Once you start throwing around the word racist, people shut up and the debate ends. Liberals call other people racist in order to avoid discussing hard issues. That’s because liberals don’t want to debate what they believe because they know they would lose. So they try to shut the other person up in order to avoid a debate.
I don’t think race is an issue here at all. But I think criminals often prey on poor people. And law enforcement doesn’t do enough to protect the poor from gang members, drug dealers and similar scum.
The race of the people involved is irrelevant. Today we might be talking about Latins, 40 years ago blacks, 70 years ago Italians and Irish. The race is different but human nature is the same.
If liberals were really concerned about race, they’d leave the Democratic Party, which supported slavery, Jim Crow, segregation and established the KKK.
Until a few years ago, the Democrats even had a U.S. Senator (Robert Byrd) who was a former top-level KKK member who organized membership drives for the Klan.
Liberal Democrats should never lecture others about racism.