2 viral videos paint disturbing picture of California's homeless crisis
SAN FRANCISCO - Two viral videos are painting a disturbing picture of California's homeless crisis: One from LA and the other from San Francisco.
Olympic volleyball medalist Kim Glass posted a message to her Instagram followers saying that she suffered some frightening facial injuries in a random attack as she left a lunch in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday. She said that a man hurled a metal object at her fracturing her eye socket.
"He had something in his hand on the other side of the car in the street and he just kind of looked at me with some pretty hateful eyes and as I turned to go tell my friend, 'I think something's wrong with him, I think he's gonna hit the car,' before I knew it, a big metal bolt, like a pipe, hit me in my eye. Hit me here, here. It happened so fast -- he literally flung it from the street so he was not even close to me at all," Glass said on her video.
Glass said her friends and strangers held down the man until the police arrived.
The suspect was arrested and charged with felony assault in the attack, the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office announced in a news release Tuesday.
Glass was taken to a local hospital, according to media reports.
And in San Francisco, recovering addict Ricci Wynne recently posted a video of school aged children getting off a city bus following a field trip and having to walk past a large group of homeless people in what he dubbed an open air drug den.
Wynne posted the video on Twitter on July 8, writing that the students were getting off the 14 transit line on 8th and Mission Streets when they encountered what appeared to be the homeless encampment sprawled across the sidewalk.
"This is no back ally [sic]," Wynne wrote. "This is a main artery in our city that has been hijacked bye [sic] drug dealers and now it is Pure filth!"
Wynne added, "Now ask yourself this question would you want your children to walk through this squalor just to get home from school?"
Wynne has posted several other videos of what he says are drug addicts on the streets of San Francisco and has called on authorities to do more to clean up the city's streets.
On Tuesday, San Francisco's newly appointed district attorney, Brooke Jenkins, toured the Tenderloin district, vowing to crack down on drug dealers as she witnessed the troubled streets herself.
She says her pledge to take action to stop open-air drug sales and use is already underway. Her office is now reviewing plea deals that have been offered, but not yet accepted to see of those deals should still be on the table.