Streets seem to get meaner for homeless: Men blame teens for rash of attacks at Galveston camp
To most people, Galveston Island is a sunny, windswept vacation spot, where the biggest problems are undertows and sunburns. There is another, much uglier, side to the island, one that most tourists never see.
GALVESTON - After suffering weeks of attacks at the hands of baseball bat-wielding teenagers, homeless men who congregate at a shopping center just blocks from this resort city's tourist-packed beaches vowed to arm themselves and wage "a war from hell."
"There's going to be a bloodbath," warned Michael Seesman, 50, informal spokesman for the men and women who camp in the area around 61st Street and Stewart Road.
In the past few months, the men said, African-American and Anglo youths have beaten them with bats as they slept, cut them with knives, threatened them with guns and pummeled them with fists.
"These kids attack us almost every day," Seesman said.
I'm in Galveston quite often as part of my job, and even with all of the time I spend there, I never see this- and I know the city pretty well. That invisibility is what the thugs depend on. They know that few on the island care about the homeless, and and most of the business community would like them to disappear by any means necessary. Still, these are human beings, and they deserve the right to live free of the fear of attack. It's just too bad no one seems to care enough to take their plight seriously.
