From women locked in cages to members of the Aryan Brotherhood, there’s nothing nice about homeless encampments

I delved into the pasts of three individuals portrayed as victims in recent news articles and discovered they all had violent criminal backgrounds

Articles in both the San Francisco Standard and the San Francisco Chronicle featured homeless encampment residents with violent criminal backgrounds

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On July 31, San Francisco Chronicle homelessness reporter Maggie Angst posted to X, “Yesterday I watched San Francisco police officers detain Ramon Castillo, an unhoused man, for 20 minutes while Public Works employees discarded almost all of his belongings. Castillo was cited for illegal lodging and then released. He lost everything … While he was sitting in the back of a squad car, Public Works employees discarded all but his tarp, which would be ‘bagged and tagged’ for possible retrieval later on. When he was released, Castillo stormed off with only the clothes on his back.” The X community, however, wasn’t having it, using the platform’s “Community Notes” feature to point out that the man had rejected a shelter offer immediately preceding the video in Angst’s post. How did they know? Because San Francisco’s Department of Emergency Services had disputed the accuracy of her entire Chronicle article, stating on X, “This story opens with Castillo explicitly rejecting an offer of shelter. Our teams always lead with services, often making multiple offers of shelter before taking any enforcement action …” It turns out that wasn’t the only thing left out of Angst’s coverage.

In an article entitled “Breed promised ‘aggressive’ sweeps of S.F. homeless encampments,” Angst spends most of her word count making Castillo look like an innocent victim. She even quotes Jennifer Friedenbach, the executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness widely discredited after decades of controlling the narrative on homelessness at City Hall. “When you look at the outcomes of these interactions, they actually exacerbate homelessness … It does so much damage and it doesn’t lead to real solutions for that individual or for the population as a whole,” Friedenbach tells Angst in a quote that she’s given hundreds of times to eager young reporters. 

The media in this town really likes to portray the homeless as victims, Friedenbach as their savior, and city officials and residents wanting to see the encampments cleared as Gotham by the Bay supervillains. Unfortunately, that’s not reality. Take Castillo, for example: on Oct. 13, 2023, he was arrested for possession of drugs and battery on a spouse/cohabitant/former spouse. He was arrested Nov. 4, 2022, for domestic abuse and threats of violence. Two months prior, on Sept. 16, 2022, Castillo was arrested for robbery and drawing/exhibiting an imitation firearm in a threatening manner. Two months before that, he was arrested for domestic violence including inflicting corporal injury and battery, assault with a deadly weapon with force likely to cause great bodily injury, and (surprise!) possession of drug paraphernalia. And a little over a year before that, on Sept. 6, 2021, Castillo was arrested for false imprisonment by violence, along with inflicting corporal injury on a spouse and assault with any means of force likely to cause great bodily injury. That’s five arrests in three years for domestic violence, as well as arrests for brandishing an imitation firearm during a robbery (I’m sure the person he robbed thought it was real) and possession of drug paraphernalia.

‘I was the # 2 hammer for the Aryan Brotherhood’

The San Francisco Standard’s Garrett Leahy and David Sjostedt also wrote sympathetically about homeless “sweeps” in an Aug. 2 column entitled “Homeless brace for arrests, lost property amid city’s ‘barbaric’ crackdown.” They talk to 59-year-old Jeff “Tex” Connick, sitting in front of his tent on Treat Avenue behind Best Buy: “They’re gonna throw our things away, arrest people.” Connick, whose real name is Jeffrey Lynn Connick, told the Standard that the City’s encampment removal is “barbaric.” 

Mayor London Breed recently implemented an executive order directing city workers to offer bus tickets to homeless people before offering shelter beds. According to the latest “Point in Time” count, the number of homeless people moving to the city from other states and California counties increased from 28 percent in 2019 to 40 percent of the total homeless population this year. (Since this data is self-reported, it’s likely much higher.) 

Upon arrival, they also discovered a woman locked in a cage and arrested seven sex offenders. DPW cleared over a million pounds of trash.

Connick said he “wouldn’t have anywhere to go with a bus ticket, because his friends and family are in San Francisco,” but Connick isn’t from San Francisco, he’s from Seattle, Washington, via North Carolina via Texas — and surprise! He has a violent criminal record. 

In 2001, Connick, then 36, asked the Washington Supreme Court to review a Court of Appeals decision to dismiss his petition for resentencing. The court granted review and affirmed the Court of Appeals dismissal of Connick’s petition. 

So, what did Connick do?

On Jan. 30, 1999, he was apprehended for shoplifting by a loss prevention officer for Nordstrom at Northgate Mall in Seattle. The victim was subpoenaed by the State to testify as a witness at trial. On April 8, 1999, while at work, she received a letter through the United States mail which read: “If you as much as give a statement to the Police or testify against me I will kill you.If you don’t think I am capable of this note that I’ve spent 15yrs in prison, I know where you work I know where you live and your birthdate is 7-12-73 So don’t play with me this is your only warning Bitch I was the # 2 hammer for the Aryan Brotherhood for 8yrs in Texas and I am not playing with you. I a[m] very serious Lady you better not contact police about this you better just do it.” The return address on the envelope was the King County Jail with Connick’s name and booking number on it.

‘I’m high all the time, I’m never not high. but that’s my retirement’

The Standard article also introduces us to 53-year-old Tracy Oxsen, who called the crackdown “cruel” and said Breed is abusing the homeless population for “political gain.” Oxsen, who has been arrested for using drugs, threats of violence, and inflicting corporal injury on a spouse, sleeps under the Central Freeway and called the city’s removal of encampments inhumane. “They made us this way,” she said. Well, not really. In Oxen’s case, it was more by design.

In March 2020, a website called “Forgotten Faces of the Bay” profiled a then 48-year-old Oxsen who said she was from California — born in Livermore and raised in Pleasanton — but recently lived in Colorado with an ex, where she claims she “held up a police station for a fucking hour. I went in there and I banged on their window, I had two large knives and stuff, and I held them up. I held people in there for an hour trying to get help because somebody drugged me.” She went on to live in Nevada with her son and his schoolteacher fiancée, and then came to San Francisco. “That was about five or six years ago now, and uh just been doing this ever since,” Oxsen explained.

When her son turned 18, Oxsen told the interviewer, “I became 19 haha. I started partying, and I was in some shit. It’s not been a whole lot of fun in the last year. So the party itself is over, I gotta do something else before I’m 50. I’m not trying to be out here, schlepping all this shit around til I’m 50, after 50.”

She also said her son has an extra bedroom and asked her to stay with him, but she’s not interested. “There’s a way out, I know what it is. I lack the ambition and follow through to carry that task out, which I guess means I’m not wanting it bad enough. Unfortunately, I’ve become complacent. This isn’t the hardest thing in the world for me to do. It’s not hard at all. It’s like being a millionaire with no money. I get anything and everything I ever fucking want. If I say I want it, I get it, I’m not kidding. It’s insane.”

When asked what the best part of being homeless in San Francisco was, Oxsen waxed poetic: “I’ve never been so free to wake up whenever, do whatever I want that day. Let the day just come and go. Who’s to say I’m wasting my time if what I’m doing makes me happy, right? Why does society get to decide what at my age I should be doing right now? … I choose to have my retirement or my vacation, or whatever you want to call it, my hiatus, partying. I’m high all the time, I’m never not high. But that’s my retirement, that’s what I’m doing. I get to wake up on beachfront property and put my fuckin’ feet into the sand and watch killer whales … I pay nothing and put my feet in the sand as soon as I wake up. I have beach front property, I have it if I want it.”

When asked what she wanted to do with her life, Oxsen said, “I did it. I raised a great kid.” Yet, when the Standard brought up the city’s efforts to connect homeless people with friends and loved ones elsewhere, Oxsen smirked, “If people’s families wanted them there, they’d be there.”

A dead baby, a woman locked in a cage, seven sex offenders

Several years ago, two of my sources at the Department of Public Works were on a crew tasked with cleaning up a massive encampment near Candlestick Park. I asked if they would take me to see it and they said it was “too scary even for them” — and these were big guys who, over the course of long careers cleaning up the filthiest city in the Bay Area, thought they had seen it all. Initially, the police were called to the camp on a report of a dead fetus. Upon arrival, they also discovered a woman locked in a cage and arrested seven sex offenders. DPW cleared over a million pounds of trash. Sound unbelievable? It was corroborated in a San Francisco Chronicle article. Sam Dodge, then director of the Healthy Streets Operations Center, told reporter Heather Knight they had been to “sites of fires, overdoses, sexual assaults, weapon use — and even people trapped inside homemade wooden structures with locks on the outside.”

As Tracy Oxsen said in that 2020 interview when asked what advice she had for the newly homeless: “Stay out of the dunes. You’re going to lose everything at least once or twice, know that now. Most of the people you meet are going to steal from you. They’re all going to put you through the ringer, because if you can’t make it then you’re not gonna make it. Don’t camp alone. If you’re young, get up out of this.”