A defenseless woman was stabbed just for being homeless in California. Is this who we are?
The field where Rosie Lander was stabbed 41 times is full of thorny weeds and packed red dirt.
Two suspects, a 14-year-old girl, and an 18-year-old boy were arrested less than a week later, thanks to Lander’s immediate identification of the girl: She and Lander’s grandniece used to play with dolls together.
As she was being attacked, Lander begged to know why the teens were doing this to her. “Because we hate homeless people,” Lander says they replied.
So this should be prosecuted as a hate crime, then. And what more proof do we need that it’s time for state legislation prohibiting discrimination based on housing status?
At 10 a.m. in the field where Lander was attacked, it was already 99 degrees and getting hotter. The heat rose up from the red ground in puffs and waves that play games with your vision. It even smelled like heat. Looking out across the barren field, white apartment complexes and a preparatory academy rise up on the far edges. The sound of cars driving through town on California’s busiest interstate is muffled from a few thousand feet away.
Shade is hard to come by in the field, but there’s a short line of scrubby trees that live within a long, low dip somewhere near the middle. It’s there, I’m told, that Rosie Lander was sleeping the hottest part of Aug. 9 away when the attack happened.
Lander, who is 50, has been living in a tent in Red Bluff, Calif. for 11 years. This field is just a stone’s throw from her family’s house, in a nearby subdivision that was built decades ago and is starting to show its age.
Within that subdivision lives the family whose 14-year-old daughter allegedly held the knife that day as her 18-year-old brother, Chuslum Buckskin, is accused of having pinned Lander down inside her tent. The girl has not been identified by the police due to her age.
By the grace of God, Lander’s family said, Rosie’s attackers missed every major artery in her body, from her legs up to her neck. But her hands are shredded from fighting back, kicking at her attackers, and trying to grab the knife’s blade, according to her sister, Galene Wallenberg.
At one point, Lander pretended to pass out and her attackers bolted, possibly believing they had killed her.
Then, Wallenberg said, her sister really did pass out from blood loss. When she came to, Rosie had enough presence of mind to pull out a cell phone she’d hidden from her attackers and she called 911.
From inside her home, Naomi Lander — Rosie’s elderly mother — saw a flood of ambulances and police cars swarm the street. Call it a mother’s intuition or just a gut feeling, Naomi said, but she knew they were there for her daughter.
The Lander family has kept their doors locked and bolted ever since. Wallenberg said not a single one of their neighbors has come to check on them, despite knowing their connection to Rosie. And since the teens’ arrest, there’s been a cold détente between the other family and theirs, Wallenberg said. “We’re afraid we might be a target next,” she said. “It’s still not over.”
The teens’ family did not respond to requests for comment. Buckskin was arrested at his home on Aug. 15 and is being held in the Tehama County jail. The minor teen girl was arrested the same day and is in a juvenile detention center. Both await trial. Rosie Lander has since been released from a nearby hospital and is staying with her daughter while she recovers from her wounds.
Everyone involved is scared of what comes next.
Angry words full of disgust
Stacie Loughlin’s home backs up to the field where Lander was stabbed.
The field is a popular place for the unhoused to congregate, and there were 50 people or more living there before a recent sweep by the Red Bluff Police Department, she said. The city brought in dump trucks and trailers and hauled the trash and tents and people away.
“They’re just filthy,” Loughlin said. “They’re really nasty and you can tell they’re crazy. It’s just scary.” She said she used to walk alone in the field for exercise, but now she brings a weapon with her in case she’s attacked.
The city’s motto is “Red Bluff: A great place to live” but the statistics don’t exactly bear that out. Your chances of being involved in either a violent crime or a property crime in Red Bluff are more than twice the national average, at 1 in 18. Neighbors say the roughest part of town is in the southeast, where Lander was living.
Red Bluff has one of the highest crime rates in any American city, large or small, even though this tiny seat of Tehama County only has about 15,000 residents. Walmart is the city’s largest employer, but Red Bluff is perhaps best known for the Red Bluff Round-up — a large annual rodeo that recently celebrated its centennial event.
The city lies about halfway between the next two biggest cities in rural northern California — approximately 40 miles north of Chico and 30 miles south of Redding — and sits snugly in the last gasp of land that comprises the Sacramento Valley, bisected by the Sacramento River and Interstate 5.
In 2021, Tehama County did a Homeless Point-In-Time count that counted 312 homeless people living in the area. There were 64 in temporary housing, 30 were in jail, and 218 were unsheltered. The vast majority were between the ages of 25 and 55, and nearly 80 percent had been living homeless in Tehama County for more than a year, while a third of those people had been homeless for more than five years.
But you don’t need to head to a conservative rural town like Red Bluff to hear angry words full of disgust aimed at the unhoused. The same words are all over the state, in diners and churches, on the streets, and in our homes:
“They should just get a job.”
“They all do drugs.”
“Their trash is everywhere.”
“They’re filthy.”
“They’re crazy.”
It would have been tough for these young suspects not to absorb the angry, and often violent, rhetoric that the adults around them throw around. In response to the anxiety of great social upheaval, humans always cast out those they perceive to be “the others.”
Only getting worse
There’s been a noticeable rise in anti-homeless rhetoric in the past decade, as the unhoused population has grown, and with it, the subsequent violence. We see it every day in microaggressions against the unhoused: We see it in our public policies that drive them further out and we see it in our dwindling empathy. In its worst form, it comes as physical violence. A beating. A shooting. A lit firework thrown into tents. A stabbing. Anything to push them further away from us so that we don’t have to think about them.
The way we speak about this group of people matters, too. They are people, first and foremost, and as the unhoused population grows, we will have to reconsider our predisposed assumptions about why they are homeless and what we have done to drive them there.
There are more than 161,000 unhoused people living in California according to the latest count, but it’s likely far, far more. The state falls further behind on housing with each passing year, with a deficit of 2.5 million homes and counting.
California must adopt new legislation that protects unhoused people from discrimination on the basis of their housing status.
There are many ways the state can adopt such legislation, wrote the American Civil Liberties Union in a 2021 report titled “Outside the Law: The Legal War Against Unhoused People” which takes a look at four cities in California that have used local ordinances to punish the homeless.
“One straightforward way,” the authors wrote, “is to add housing status to the protected statuses recognized by California’s existing anti-discrimination legislation.”
California already prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex, race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, ethnic group identification, age, mental disability, physical disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, and sexual orientation.
State and local government’s unchecked discrimination of more than 161,000 people who live in this state — yes, they live here, whether they are housed or not — has allowed hatred and persecution to fester.
When we stop caring about a group of people, it’s easier to pass local laws that criminalize their existence. Such is the case in Chico, very near to Red Bluff, which has not only made it illegal since 2018 to sit or lie down on sidewalks between 7 a.m. and 11 p.m., but has increasingly elected city council members who run on platforms of aggressive policies toward the homeless. Chico even forced the resignation of one council member who displayed public empathy toward the unhoused.
Sacramento’s own, continuing struggle to find any semblance of solidarity between county and city efforts to end homeless is also proof: Here, aggressive business interests gain the upper hand over advocates with policies such the City of Sacramento’s Measure O, which would criminalize homelessness.
The County of Sacramento has recently voted to amend two ordinances that make it illegal to camp near the American River and Dry Creek parkways, all while offering no real alternative housing option. Meanwhile, the number of homeless people in Sacramento County has nearly doubled over the past three years.
Homelessness is not an unchangeable characteristic, like one’s race, ancestry or medical condition — but the label does generate a stigma around a clearly-defined social class that allows us to define our unhoused neighbors as something less than worthy of our care or assistance.
Including the homeless as protected class within California would not only give them special protections in criminal cases such as Lander’s — where her housing status was the clear motivation for the attack — but would also protect the unhoused from punitive, ineffective policies that serve only to further reduce their circumstances, incite violence and alienate them from the rest of us.
Rosie Lander will recover physically. Her wounds are beginning to heal already, her family said. But the hate crime against her continues to reverberate through Red Bluff and the state beyond. And homelessness itself cannot be stabbed or pushed or jailed out of existence.
A previous version of this column misstated the relationship of the two suspects arrested for allegedly assaulting a homeless woman in Red Bluff. They are brother and sister.
This story was originally published August 26, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
