Beating under investigation

By April M. Silvaggio  

SEPTEMBER 20, 2010 10:16 a.m. (0)

One week after the death of a homeless man who was found severely beaten and unresponsive last Tuesday morning off West Blue Ridge Drive near Cedar Lane Road in Greenville County, investigators have no suspects.

Terry Steven White, 55, died last Thursday at Greenville Memorial Hospital after lingering for two days in critical condition.

He never regained consciousness.

An autopsy showed he’d been bludgeoned to death.

A caller alerted authorities to the situation about 9:45 a.m. last Tuesday after he arrived to pick White up for work and found him motionless with abrasions to his face, said Master Deputy Sam Cureton, spokesman for the Greenville County Sheriff’s Office.

A deputy arrived 35 minutes later, according to an incident report that offered few other details except to say White’s face was swollen and his eye sockets blue from bruising.

White had been living under a tree yards away from a bustling highway, his mattress and few personal belongings concealed by vegetation. Food, clothing, a white bucket, a few covers and some black garbage bags were scattered around his campsite.

He was found on the ground, not far from there.

Cureton said investigators aren’t sure if he was attacked there or someplace else.

“We are still following leads, and asking for the public’s help with information,” Cureton said this week. “Investigators don’t have a motive at this time.”

Too often, cases involving attacks on homeless people are never solved, said Neil J. Donovan, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless in Washington, D.C.

“We see these people treated worse in death than they were in life, and they were treated pretty poorly in life,” Donovan said. “If they were forgotten as a living human being, then the odds are almost certain that as a crime victim what happened to them will become a cold case.”

New data shows homeless people nationwide were singled out in more than 1,000 attacks during the past 11 years by perpetrators motivated by anti-homeless hostility and a perception of their victims as easy targets.

Last year was the deadliest in a decade for hate crimes against the homeless, with 43 people killed, according to a report by Donovan’s organization. That’s an increase from 27 killings in 2008.

The National Coalition for the Homeless chronicled such crimes as homeless people doused with gasoline and set on fire and others beaten with aluminum baseball bats, golf clubs or pipes.

There are plenty of cases that involve a homeless person being attacked by another homeless person in the midst of a theft or robbery, Donovan said. But more and more, the advocacy group’s research is documenting assailants attacking the homeless or killing merely for the sport of it when they find a vulnerable victim who can’t fight back.

Donovan said a festering resentment or hatred of the homeless may be driving more people across the U.S. to take action against them. People’s own economic insecurities, including worries about possibly finding themselves on the street one day, can drive them to transfer those frustrations onto the homeless.

“It’s the fear of that being your face in the mirror,” Donovan said.

Donovan said he is watching the Greenville County case to see what evidence is turned up.

“It could be by friend or foe, and that remains to be seen,” Donovan said. “But one thing is for certain. It is becoming far more typical for this to happen to the unhoused.”