Brentwood residents have grown accustomed to seeing the same woman relieve herself on neighborhood sidewalks. One neighbor remembers mentioning it years ago, only to learn there was apparently nothing unusual about the sight anymore.
“Oh yeah, she does that every morning,” Wendy Kush recalled a neighbor telling her.
Kush had tried to get the woman help. Then, on Tuesday, she encountered her while walking with her young daughter and dogs.
This time, Kush told FOX 11, the woman started yelling that she was going to kill her and lunged in her direction.
A Familiar Face
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Video aired by FOX 11 shows the woman with her pants down near Goshen and Barrington avenues in Brentwood. The station blurred the footage.
Neighbors said she has been defecating along sidewalks in the area for years.
Kush initially saw someone who needed help. She told the station she began calling 311 and homeless outreach organizations, eventually reaching a group that spent months trying to locate the woman.
“They finally found her, and I thought something great would happen,” Kush said.
According to Kush, the organization later told her the woman had refused services and there was nothing more it could do.
Then came Tuesday’s encounter.
Kush was outside with her daughter and dogs when the woman came around a corner and began threatening her. Kush said one of her dogs was moving slowly, making it difficult to get away.
She eventually ran, and the dogs followed.
“It was really scary,” Kush said.
Not Just Her
Kush posted about what happened on Nextdoor. Other neighbors responded with accounts of being chased or threatened by the same woman on other occasions, according to FOX 11.
Some residents said they had contacted police or elected representatives.
Laurie Sideman described a frustrating response from agencies residents have approached: people have been compassionate and wanted to help, she said, but residents keep hearing that their hands are tied.
“We’re also told that they really can’t do anything unless there’s an actual violent act,” Sideman told the station.
The situation has left neighbors balancing two very different concerns. They want the public defecation and threatening behavior to stop, but several also told FOX 11 they believe the woman needs professional help.
Kush did not describe the issue simply as getting an unwanted person out of the neighborhood. She said she wants treatment for people living on the streets who need it.
The Calls Move Up
By Wednesday, the complaints had reached Los Angeles City Hall.
Councilmember Traci Park’s office characterized the situation as part of the mental-health crisis playing out on city streets and called for Los Angeles County’s Department of Mental Health to become involved.
The mayor’s office also alerted the Los Angeles Police Department and asked the county’s Emergency Centralized Response Center to deploy a mental-health outreach team, according to FOX 11.
That request puts the case into a system specifically designed to coordinate responses involving people living unsheltered.
The Los Angeles County Emergency Centralized Response Center accepts referrals involving unsheltered people and dispatches outreach teams for assessment and follow-up. More than 150 outreach teams operate under the center’s coordination, with county mental-health, health, homelessness and other agencies represented in the system.
Those teams can connect people living outside with housing, healthcare, mental-health treatment and other services.
For Brentwood residents, that means the latest round of calls has produced something more concrete than another complaint: a request from the mayor’s office for a county outreach team to go find the woman.