On
the evening of August 12, when 19-year-old Ali Cokley was shot in the head at the city-owned
lot on C�sar Chavez between San Antonio and Guadalupe, the trucks that
routinely pull in to pick up day laborers had long stopped coming. Cokley was
fatally wounded right next to a line of porta-johns that sits behind Liberty
Lunch and the homeless service provider Helping Our Brothers Out (HOBO). But
HOBO had closed its doors at 4pm; and there was no show scheduled that night at
Liberty Lunch. So what was Cokley — and all the other people who were there —
doing in the lot?
According to Frank, who claimed to be a friend of the victim but declined to
give his last name, the shooting had been prompted by an earlier incident in
which Cokley and a partner had robbed a man of his dope at gun point — “In
broad daylight they just pulled a gun on him, robbed him” — and after another
altercation on Monday the 12th, says Frank, “the guy left and got a gun and
came back” and shot Cokley. Some elements of this account seem consistent with
the Austin Police Department’s report: Spokesperson Michelle Walker said police
heard there had been more than one shot, and that they believed the shooting
“stemmed from a prior argument.” And on August 13, the APD issued a warrant for
a 31-year-old East Austin resident. Walker would not comment on the
investigation or on whether APD believes the crime to be drug-related.
The details of life after-hours at the day labor site that the shooting
incident uncovered are hardly a revelation to HOBO representatives, or to local
business owners like Liberty Lunch’s Mark Pratz, who say they’ve complained for
the past year about the loitering. They watched the area grow dangerous as
drinking, drug-dealing, and even prostitution became regular features of the
lot at night. And yet, when asked prior to the incident if APD considered the
area a problem at night, Assistant Police Chief Bruce Mills said, “It would be
if I’d heard complaints, but I haven’t heard any complaints.” Similarly, when
Assistant City Manager Joe Lessard was asked about reports of drug-dealing and
fighting on the lot, he said, “This is the first I’ve heard that there were
those kinds of problems at night… I’m not aware of those problems — maybe
there’s somebody who is — if there’s some difficulty down there, then we need
to look into that.”
But while the city’s staff and police force may have been shocked by the
deadly violence that broke out near HOBO three weeks ago, HOBO workers who
oversee the lot during the day say they had predicted that it was just a matter
of time. “We’ve asked the APD so many times,” said HOBO executive director
Teresa Ramos, “We need 24-hour security here. We’re here till four o’clock [in
the afternoon]; after that, you know, it’s party time.” Nor did the incident
surprise Pratz, who is supposed to have the use of the lot after 5pm for his
customers. Pratz observed, a few days before the murder, that, “It’s pretty
much turned into an open-air crack market out there.”
Certainly this is not the kind of thriving enterprise one envisions when
downtown honchos speak of the “revitalization of the Warehouse District,” the
area spreading north from the lot which has fostered the success of Liberty
Lunch and more recently the Austin Music Hall, La Zona Rosa, and Live Oak
Theatre. Perhaps it is impossible for an outsider to know the whole truth about
what happened to Ali Cokley, and whether drugs were involved, but it is
possible to examine the history of the lot and what goes on there during the
day and at night, as a way of understanding the circumstances that made
something like this, as Pratz said, “inevitable.”
Since February 1993, the lot has been the designated pick-up site for day
laborers. Neighborhood groups had long complained of fights, drinking, and drug
use at the old, unofficial site on C�sar Ch�vez and I-35, but it
was not until the Convention Center opened nearby that the city council
approved the new site and placed it under the supervision of HOBO. At the time,
it seemed like a good idea. The Texas Employment Commission (TEC) set up an
office on the site to help the non-profit Labor Connections Program,
which is also at the site, find temporary work for the laborers and ensure
their payment; HOBO provided the laborers, many of whom are homeless, with the
facilities to clean up and go to the bathroom, make phone calls, get
counseling, even find permanent homes and jobs.
But then things took a turn for the worse. City budget cuts caused HOBO to
drop some services this year, and the TEC pulled up stakes as well. That left
Labor Connections to deal single-handedly with the increasing population of
laborers — director Adam Cantu said that of the 500 or so clients he sees
daily, 80% are illegal immigrants. The no-camping ordinance passed this year
made the lot somewhat of a political Twilight Zone, as hundreds slept there
nightly in defiance of the law. (Until the shooting, the ordinance was not
enforced in the area.) APD spokesperson Sally Muir said police calls in the 400
block of Cesar Chavez have increased over the years, going from 58 in 1994 to
74 in 1995. By the end of July this year, 50 calls have come in on “anything
from public intoxication, pedestrians in the roadway, minor assaults — a
fairly wide variety,” said Muir. Considering the number of laborers and
homeless who use the area, “The lot’s too small,” complained Cantu.
Just one week before the
shooting, I interviewed Joyce Pohlman, of the city’s Department of Health and
Human Services’ Planning and Evaluation Office, which will be overseeing HOBO’s
move. She was unaware of the situation at HOBO. “Are there really people
sleeping at HOBO at night?” Pohlman asked. Yes, there were — hundreds of
them; and as I walked down San Antonio to C�sar Chavez on Friday, August
2, their bodies were packed tightly side-by-side on the concrete dock that runs
along the west side of HOBO’s building. All of those people slept there “at
their own risk,” said HOBO’s Ramos — clients are warned of the no-camping
ordinance both verbally and by signs posted around the dock, but most ignore
it.
On that Friday morning at 7am, HOBO opened, and the bodies stirred and rose,
as church groups and neighborhood charities pulled into the lot to offer free
breakfasts of hard-boiled eggs, tortillas, and coffee. Already, the laborers
were divided by race; blacks congregated on benches under kiosks on the west
side of the lot, while Hispanics settled under the eastern ones, and crowded
the east entrance to the lot. Then the trucks came. Each time one pulled into
the lot, the men mobbed around it before the driver had a chance to roll down
the window, shouting and holding up their hands like a class full of students
bursting to answer a teacher’s question. The driver surveyed the crowd, picked
out one, maybe two men seemingly at random, and then left the rest to drift
back to their posts beneath the kiosks.
“I’m not up here to hang out,” a man named Solomon Gardner told me, “I’m here
to work… I’m here to make money.” Gardner does not sleep at the lot
like some of the men, instead paying $8.50 a night for a room at the Bunk Haus
on East Seventh. He had ridden the ‘Dillo here this morning to try to get some
work before going to his part-time job as a telemarketer. He’s worked as a
painter, ditch-digger, and in construction, but he laughed when I asked him
what a laborer can expect to earn in a week. “You’ll average $60-70 if you work
a minimum of eight hours,” he said. But most workers usually receive about $5
an hour, Gardner added, and “unless you got a long-term job — two or three
days is max” as far as the availability of work for the week. Gardner said it’s
a matter of “jugglin’ and strugglin'” to keep his room and part-time job, and
he merely hopes to get by until he earns his cosmetology degree so he can cut
hair for a living.
By 8:30am, many of the men had already been picked up and whisked away to help
do the grunt work that lays the foundation for the suburbs springing up around
Austin. As it got hotter, the remaining men settled in for a long wait,
exchanging newspapers and talking, and a group of Hispanic men began kicking a
soccer ball around on the eastern edge of the lot. The police arrived, in the
form of a cruiser and two vans, and this drew the invective of some of the men.
“The cops got nothing better to do than hang around here all day harassing
homeless people,” one man observed. “That’s what gives people the perception
that something bad’s going on around here, ’cause they drive by and see all the
cops.”
But Mills of the APD responded that it’s more than “perception” — the APD
gets an increasing number of complaints about the men from the lot “spilling
out of there and impeding the flow of traffic… We’re going to increase
patrols down there, to make sure they’re not impeding traffic or standing in
the roadway.” Indeed, true to Chief Mills’ word, at about 9am a red pickup got
pulled over on Guadalupe just outside the lot, for stopping on the street to
solicit workers. The driver cursed, spat on the sidewalk, and lamely complained
that “I thought it was illegal to pull in there” as his ticket was written up;
the Mexican man who rushed into the street to climb into the truck, meanwhile,
was arrested and led to one of the police vans. “That’s what they’re asked to
do,” said Mills when I asked him about the incident, “check it out during
rush-hour times.”
This approach takes on aspects of the absurd, however, when applied to the
scores of men flagging down work on the streets surrounding the labor lot.
Typically, they fan out in clusters along Second Street as far east as Congress
Avenue, and on August 2 a large group of Mexican nationals waited on Second
across from City Hall. Two men explained that they don’t like to wait in the
labor lot — “Too many blacks.” Five men from Monterrey said they all sleep in
an abandoned building downtown — they don’t like to sleep at the HOBO lot
because it’s “too dangerous… too many drugs.” They work in order to send
money home to their families — as much as $100 a week.
As I talked with the men, a police cruiser pulled up and stopped at the curb,
and the men began to drift away in the opposite direction. This is the subtle
game police must play with the laborers outside the lot, since it’s not illegal
to stand out there waiting for a job. Yet because most of the men are illegal immigrants, they disappear when the cops show up; I watched the cruiser
disperse several other clusters in the same way.
Most area merchants don’t mind the laborers’ presence, as it turns out. A
representative from the nearby Live Oak Theatre said, “These are just guys
looking for work. They’re pretty good guys.” Another nearby business owner, who
asked not to be named, commented that he doesn’t have a problem with the
workers. “They’re just trying to make some money to live, to feed their
families. They don’t bother us, or our customers,” he said. This merchant had
even hired some of the men from time to time to work in his shop. Yet everyone
qualifies their endorsement of the “guys just looking for work” by adding, as
the Live Oak rep did, “I’m not going to say there haven’t been problems” — and
therein lies the rub. “We’ve had some problems with people breaking into cars
and stuff, and we’ve always been able to trace it back to the transients at
HOBO, ’cause they try to sell it back to us.”
“The day-labor part of it is not the problem,” Pratz of Liberty Lunch
explained. “The real problem down there is they’re being allowed to sleep on
the loading dock at night.” (In a subsequent interview, Pratz said that the
police have reduced the number of people sleeping on the dock since the
shooting, but drugs are still bought and sold in the area.)
The question is whether some of the men who hustle jobs during the day are the
same criminals who break into cars and deal dope. And if so, when does a man
cease being “just a guy looking for work” and start being a “transient”? The
Downtown Austin Alliance (DAA), a self-taxing business group which represents
property owners in central downtown, has been very vocal in wanting the labor
lot moved, even writing a letter to the city manager calling the lot an
“eyesore.” Tom Stacy, vice chairman of the DAA’s board of directors, defined it
this way: “After nine o’clock in the morning, they’re really transitioned from
being laborers to being vagrants.” Pratz is a bit more lenient, giving the
laborers until 3:30 or 4pm — after that, he said, “There’s nobody coming
around [looking for workers] — then they have to close the place down.”
It is true that as the after-
noon of August 2 wore on, the men lingered around the lot. It is true that many
of them had not found work. And it is true that 24-oz. cans of Schlitz wrapped
in paper bags began to appear between men’s feet. It is also true that there is
never enough work for all the men, and the trucks that did pull in were
dropping men back off at the lot, because they had nowhere else to go. The
midday heat on the asphalt lot was unbearable, and the level of frustration and
racial tension rose with the temperature: “You wanna know what the dirt is
around here?” a man named Leroy said to me. “It’s the Mexicans… the
wetbacks… illegal aliens — they all say it’s the blacks, but it’s the
Mexicans.”
I sat with Leroy and Tyrone for a while in the square of shade beneath the
kiosk. Tyrone, who had only worked about 12 days in the last month, making $60
each time, complained, “We lost a lot of work when they moved this place from
I-35. Back then we could get work every day, guaranteed — even at one o’clock
in the afternoon. Here you’re not guaranteed a job even if you show up at 6am.”
Both also grumbled about the frequent presence of the police and about the
expected drug activity in the lot that night, since it was the first of the
month and everyone had money.
“Yeah, it’s a different world,” said Tyrone. “You don’t wanna be out here at
night. Don’t come here after dark — shoot — don’t come here after five
o’clock,” he laughed.
Although APD vehemently denied it, Rick Aguilar, the security guard who
patrols the lot during the day for HOBO, contends that “the approach the police
take is that this is a corral, and as long as they can keep everything penned
in here, then it’s okay.” Cantu of Labor Connections added, “I think if they
can have all of them contained in this area, they feel better about them being
here than out in the neighborhoods — even though there’s drugs, fighting,
prostitution…” Even Pratz, responding to talk of the labor lot and HOBO being
moved and the area demolished, said, “It may be the police are not wanting to
do anything to force the issue… I can see that letting the area deteriorate
is a great way to speed that process.”
Failing to heed Tyrone’s
advice, I returned to the lot that Friday evening around 9pm, although my visit
proved to be short-lived. At first glance, not much seemed to have changed
since earlier in the day; there was still a strong police presence in the area,
but now the officers were occupied with barricading streets and directing
traffic as the crowds rolled down to Town Lake for the start of Aquafest. Many
of the same men still haunted the kiosks, and several others still kicked
around the soccer ball, though now at the western edge of the lot. The tension
was palpable as I entered the lot — several men flagged me down to ask who I
was, what I was doing there; others who remembered talking to me earlier
explained that I was a reporter, though this news hardly seemed to reassure
them. Some drank beer, which could be bought for a buck a can from a garbage
bucket filled with ice. A craps game broke out beneath one kiosk, and a few men
gathered around to slap down money and roll the dice. Another man called me
over and asked my name, and was not satisfied when I explained I was a reporter
for the Chronicle. “Well my name’s Cliff and I work at IBM, and this
here’s Jim, he works at Dell Computer,” he scoffed, indicating the man on the
bench beside him. “What you doin’ here, man — why you writing about us — why
don’t you go write about Aquafest, all the millions they’re losing…”
At this point, four young men strolled onto the lot and approached the kiosks,
and the tension level rose a bit more. Perhaps Ali Cokley was one of them, or
they were his friends — at any rate they all appeared to be around 18-20 years
old, dressed similarly to Frank, Ali’s friend, in hightops and gold chains and
Fila T-shirts. Certainly they didn’t seem to be regular day laborers, just as
the security guard and Ramos at HOBO told me that Cokley was not.
Nobody said anything and nothing was seen, but one by one, people begin to sit
down on a bench beside one of the young men, and money changed hands, while the
rest of the men eyed me suspiciously. I never got a chance to find out exactly
what was being bought, as a Hispanic man approached me and said, “Hey man, we
don’t need no snitch around here. You better leave.”
I looked up at him, tried to explain who I was, protested that I wasn’t a
“snitch.”
“We know who you are — I think you should just leave.”
Once again, I tried to explain, offered to show my ID — by this time I
noticed several others loping towards me, and the man talking to me was
sweating furiously and clenching his fists and seemed very, very serious: “I
don’t need to see your ID,” he shouted — “We know who you are — you better
just leave — now.” I was finally inclined to agree, and so I left — my
friend tracking me just to make sure. Another of the young men passed me as I
exited the lot, but by that time I was already back among the world of Aquafest
crowds and police barricades, and out of the odd land of the labor lot.
One would like, at this point,
to make some grand statement about the labor lot and its problems, to say that
in the wake of Cokley’s death, security will be heightened, drug-dealing and
fighting will be wiped out, jobs will be secured for all the workers and
everyone will live happily ever after. According to Pratz, police are trying to
do their part; APD had “stepped up surveillance and undercover activity” in the
weeks prior to the shooting, and maybe this explains Chief Mills’ reticence in
discussing the department’s after-hours efforts. The most noticeable change in
the lot since Cokley’s shooting, although again police refuse to comment, is
the apparent crackdown on homeless people sleeping on the HOBO dock. Ramos says
two people have been ticketed for loitering on the lot at night and told not to
come back, and word has gotten around that overnight stays will no longer be
tolerated. “It’s like a normal business now,” Ramos says, “We don’t have to
walk over people to get to the door.” Pratz adds that police officers came to
see him the day after the shooting, to assure him that they’ll increase their
presence even more “as part of a comprehensive plan.”
The future of the labor lot itself, and HOBO for that matter, is not so
reassuring. HOBO Director Hunter Morris says he’s gotten the word from Mayor
Bruce Todd that “HOBO is going to be moving and the day labor site is going to
be moving, too, because the city is going to be demolishing four-and-a-half
blocks here.” Morris adds that the move will probably be made by next spring. A
blue-ribbon committee, he says, is already being formed to locate a new site
for HOBO; it will include representatives from HOBO, the city, and the DAA.
But will the labor site stay with HOBO? Pohlman of the Department of Health
and Human Services, who will help with the move, says “The day labor site is
kind of its own thing… I don’t know if that’s going to be a part of HOBO’s
new location or not.”
The DAA isn’t waiting to find out; Tom Stacy says the group has “taken it upon
ourselves to look into [a new labor site] and present it to the city.” Stacy
believes “the day laborers and the city would be better served by having one
north and one south [location], where the construction is taking place.”
Assistant City Manager Lessard says, “We’d be interested in looking at anyone’s
ideas — we’re looking at whatever would work for the laborers and the
surrounding community. I think the first thing is to find appropriate sites
with buffer areas, which are near arteries of transportation, and then talking
to the surrounding communities and gaining their support.” As to the question
of whether the lot will remain part of HOBO, Lessard says, “I think they’re
somewhat coordinated, so it would be best to keep them together. There’s a need
for this in the community and we need to find a place for it.”
If that’s the case, Cantu wonders, why isn’t more being done now to find a new
labor site? “If indeed they’re going to do something for the homeless, then
they need to look at where to relocate the labor corner… and then we have to
make sure that the neighborhoods are willing to have us there.”
Will a move get rid of the drug dealers and criminals who frequent the lot? Or
will they just relocate, too? “If they tear the whole thing down,” says Pratz,
“maybe it’ll all just move into the ravine there behind the Austin Music Hall.”
Or, as laborer Solomon Gardner put it, “If they move this thing, it’s just
gonna move the problem from one area to another.”
The problem has already been moved once, and while police and city efforts to
keep the day laborers on the designated lot during the daytime may be
well-intentioned, the same approach at night has contributed to the prevalence
of fighting, drug dealing, and now the shooting of Ali Cokley. Perhaps in
locating a new labor site, city officials will be more realistic about the
living situations of those whom the site is intended to serve, and will find a
way to ensure their safety, as well as that of the surrounding neighborhoods.
As laborer Gardner says, “There’s a lot of people waiting on that corner who do
want to work — maybe one out of five people has a roof over their heads.
They’re struggling. They just want to get on their feet.” n
“The approach the police take is that this is a corral, and as long as they can
keep everything penned in here, then it’s okay.” — Rick Aguilar, the security
guard who patrols HOBO’s day labor site
When does a man cease being “just a guy looking for work” and start being a
“transient”? “Are there really people sleeping at HOBO at night?” asked Joyce Pohlman,
homeless coordinator for the city’s Department of Health and Human Services.
Yes, there were — hundreds of them.
This article appears in August 30 • 1996 and August 30 • 1996 (Cover).