Stories from NJ homeless camp going before judge

Stories of residents of longtime NJ homeless camp going to judge weighing its fate

Associated Press -

LAKEWOOD, N.J. (AP) -- One is a nurse with three college degrees who says she was hit by a car and disabled. Another says he was born with brain damage and has bipolar disorder.

One was a bagger at a supermarket who says she was fired for absenteeism after taking care of her dying boyfriend. One says he's a homeless Navy veteran who needs a hernia operation, and another says he's a homeless Marine veteran of Iraq who wants nothing more than to find a job.

Still another claims to have once been a millionaire but is now penniless.

They all say the same thing: that they want nothing more than to get out of the flimsy tents in the woods where they have been living and find some stable, safe housing. On Friday, the stories of 16 residents of Lakewood's Tent City, written in their own words, will go before a judge who is being asked by the town to shut down the longtime encampment and evict its 80 or so residents.

"I would love to get out of Tent City," wrote Beth Paterson, 56, who worked as a nurse at Lakehurst Naval Base and a nursing home before being hit by a car and disabled. "I have a 16-year-old son who lived with me before the accident, but I cannot currently afford an apartment where we could live. I had to send him to live with my parents — age 82 and 93 — and I miss him terribly. Why would I want to try and survive the winter living in the woods if I could be indoors with my son?"

Superior Court Judge Joseph Foster will hold a hearing Friday, the latest in the yearslong effort by Lakewood and Ocean County to shut down the camp. Advocates for the residents say that there is no shelter anywhere in the region for homeless adults and that the governments have not done enough to provide safe housing for them.

The issue has vexed the judge, who is wrestling with the many legal, moral and intensely personal issues the case has raised. Last year, he ruled the government has some responsibility to care for the poor, but the extent of that care, and how it is provided, remains to be determined.

The camp, now in its seventh winter, encompasses township-owned land about 11 miles northwest of Seaside Heights, home of the reality show "Jersey Shore." They live in plastic or fabric tents, some atop wooden platforms, many more on the muddy ground. Chickens wander about, squawking, and smoke from campfires and stoves curls into the air.

Barbecue grills in the center of the camp are used to cook meals, heavy on donated macaroni and cheese, beans and pasta. Church services are held in a tent or outdoors each night.

Earlier this year, Lakewood threatened daily fines of $1,000 for each of the site's 100 tents and 80 wood burning stoves. They cited health and sanitary issues at the site, as well as complaints from nearby residents. Lakewood's mayor called conditions there "disgusting" and "horrendous."

But the camp cannot be closed without the judge's permission because of the ongoing litigation.

The stories of the homeless residents are part of legal filings by Jeffrey Wild, a lawyer representing the Tent City occupants for free. In addition to seeking to move the judge by showing how illness, an accident, the loss of a job or just plain bad luck can leave the most successful people without a home, the stories also seem designed to counter criticism from some officials and neighbors that the Tent City residents are lazy and want to stay in the woods indefinitely.

"Everyone agrees that there should not have to be tent cities, and that Tent City should cease to exist as soon as all of (its) residents have access to safe and adequate indoor shelter, so they no longer need to live outside in the woods," Wild wrote to the judge.

Lakewood wants the judge, among other things, to order a "census" of camp residents, force them to apply for county assistance, ban any new arrivals and order that the site be turned over to Lakewood at an unspecified future date.

The claims of the homeless residents could not be independently verified, but each one signed a legal document asserting their statements to the judge are true and acknowledging they can be punished if they prove false.

John Chertowsky, 42, wrote that he was born with brain damage and has suffered from bipolar disorder and severe depression and anxiety his whole life, leaving him unable to finish high school. He worked sporadically as a long-line fisherman, a landscaper and the manager of a Burger King restaurant.

"Right now I have absolutely nothing in terms of money," he wrote. "I came to Tent City with only the clothes on my back, and if it had not been for being able to survive winter in Tent City, I am sure that I would be dead."

Lorraine Schultz, 62, says she lost her job at a supermarket when she took too much time off to care for her dying boyfriend, who had been with her for 22 years. She says she lost her apartment in Seaside Heights and stayed with friends briefly before ending up in Tent City with her dog, Peanut.

"This is the hardest time I have ever had in my entire life, and I certainly don't want to be here," she wrote. "In addition to being a senior citizen, I also suffer from diabetes and high blood pressure. The conditions are very tough, including the cold and the hardship of just getting decent food to eat."

Others whose stories the judge will hear include:

— Enna Chin, 52, who said she owned a Chinese restaurant, sold real estate and was a successful investor, once worth $1 million. "This is my last resort," she wrote.

— Joe Giammona, who wrote that he joined the Marine Corps out of high school, serving three tours in Afghanistan and two in Iraq. He's been at Tent City for nearly a year after being unable to find a landscaping or construction job — or even one stocking shelves. The cheapest apartment he could find, for $800 a month, costs more than he makes in a month.

— Angelo Villanueva, 46, a construction worker who said he helped build Home Depot, Lowes and Staples stores, and laid the foundations and stairs for the homes of several celebrities in New Jersey. He once made $25 an hour; now he gets $8 an hour — before taxes — separating recyclables from garbage.

___

Reviving the Woolly Mammoth: Will De-Extinction Become Reality?

This photo shows a museum worker inspecting a replica of a woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius), a relative of modern elephants that went extinct 3,000 to 10,000 years ago.

Biologists briefly brought the extinct Pyrenean ibex back to life in 2003 by creating a clone from a frozen tissue sample harvested before the goat's entire population vanished in 2000. The clone survived just seven minutes after birth, but it gave scientists hope that "de-extinction," once a pipedream, could become a reality.

Ten years later, a group of researchers and conservationists gathered in Washington, D.C., today (March 15) for a forum calledTEDxDeExtinction, hosted by the National Geographic Society, to talk about how to revive extinct animals, from the Tasmanian tigerand the saber-toothed tiger to the woolly mammoth and the North American passenger pigeon.

Though scientists don't expect a real-life "Jurassic Park" will ever be on the horizon, a species that died a few tens of thousands of years ago could be resurrected as long as it has enough intact ancient DNA.

Some have their hopes set on the woolly mammoth, a relative of modern elephants that went extinct 3,000 to 10,000 years ago and left behind some extraordinarily well preserved carcasses in Siberian permafrost. Scientists in Russia and South Korea have embarked on an ambitious project to try to create a living specimen using the DNA-storing nucleus of a mammoth cell and an Asian elephant egg — a challenging prospect, as no one has ever been able to harvest eggs from an elephant. [Image Gallery: Bringing Extinct Animals Back to Life]

But DNA from extinct species doesn't need to be preserved in Arctic conditions to be useful to scientists — researchers have been able to start putting together the genomes of extinct species from museum specimens that have been sitting on shelves for a century. If de-extinction research has done anything for science, it's forced researchers to look at the quality of the DNA in dead animals, said science journalist Carl Zimmer, whose article on de-extinction featured on the cover of the April issue of National Geographic magazine.

"It's not that good but you can come up with techniques to retrieve it," Zimmer told LiveScience.

For instance, a team that includes Harvard genetics expert George Church is trying to bring back the passenger pigeon — a bird that once filled eastern North America's skies. They have been able to piece together roughly 1 billion letters (Each of four amino acids make up DNA has a letter designation) in the bird's genome based on DNA from a 100-year-old taxidermied museum specimen. They hope to incorporate those genes responsible for certain traits into the genome of a common rock pigeon to bring back the passenger pigeon, or at least create something that looks like it.

A few years ago, another group of researchers isolated DNA from a 100-year-old specimen of a young thylacine, also known as Tasmanian tiger. The pup had been preserved in alcohol at Museum Victoria in Melbourne. Its genetic material was inserted into mouse embryos, which proved functional in live mice. [Photos: The Creatures of Cryptozoology]

Should we?

Now that de-extinction looms as a possibility, it presents some thorny questions: Should we bring back these species? And what would we do them?

Stuart Pimm of Duke University argued in an opinion piece in National Geographic that these efforts would be a "colossal waste" if scientists don't know where to put revived species that had been driven off the planet because their habitats became unsafe.

"A resurrected Pyrenean ibex will need a safe home," Pimm wrote. "Those of us who attempt to reintroduce zoo-bred species that have gone extinct in the wild have one question at the top of our list: Where do we put them? Hunters ate this wild goat to extinction. Reintroduce a resurrected ibex to the area where it belongs and it will become the most expensive cabrito ever eaten."

Pimm also worries that de-extinction could create a false impression that science can save endangered species, turning the focus away from conservation. But others argue that bringing back iconic, charismatic creatures could stir support for species preservation.

"Some people feel that watching scientists bring back the great auk and putting it back on a breeding colony would be very inspiring," Zimmer told LiveScience. The great auk was the Northern Hemisphere's version of the penguin. The large flightless birds went extinct in the mid-19th century.

Other species disappeared before scientists had a chance to study their remarkable biological abilities — like the gastric brooding frog, which vanished from Australia in the mid-1980s, likely due to timber harvesting and the chytrid fungus.

"This was not just any frog," Mike Archer, a paleontologist at the University of New South Wales, said during his talk at TEDxDeExtinction, which was broadcast via livestream. These frogs had a unique mode of reproduction: The female swallowed fertilized eggs, turned its stomach into a uterus and gave birth to froglets through the mouth.

"No animal, let alone a frog, has been known to do this – change one organ in the body into another," Archer said. He's using cloning methods to put gastric brooding frog nuclei into eggs of living Australian marsh frogs. Archer announced today that his team has already created early-stage embryos of the extinct species forming hundreds of cells.

"I think we're gonna have this frog hopping glad to be back in the world again," he said.

Editor's Note: This story has been updated to correct the year the Pyrenean ibex clone was created.

Vatican: anti-clerical campaign against pope

VATICAN CITY (AP) — The honeymoon that Pope Francis has enjoyed since his remarkable election hit a bump Friday, with theVatican lashing out at what it called a defamatory and "anti-clerical left-wing" media campaign questioning his actions duringArgentina's murderous military dictatorship.

On Day 2 of the Francis pontificate, the Vatican denounced news reports in Argentina and beyond resurrecting allegations that the former Jorge Mario Bergoglio failed to openly confront the junta responsible for kidnapping and killing thousands of people in a "dirty war" to eliminate leftist opponents.

Bergoglio, like most Argentines, didn't publicly confront the dictators who ruled from 1976-83, while he was the leader of the country's Jesuits. And human rights activists differ on how much blame he personally deserves.

Top church leaders had endorsed the junta and some priests even worked alongside torturers inside secret prisons. Nobody has produced any evidence suggesting Bergoglio had anything to do with such crimes. But many activists are angry that as archbishop of Buenos Aires for more than a decade, he didn't do more to support investigations into the atrocities.

On Thursday, the old ghosts resurfaced.

A group of 44 former military and police officers on trial for torture, rape and murder in a concentration camp in Cordoba province in the 1970s wore the yellow-and-white ribbons of the papal flag in Francis' honor. Many Argentine newspapers ran the photo Friday.

The Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi noted that Argentine courts had never accused Bergoglio of any crime, that he had denied all accusations against him and that on the contrary "there have been many declarations demonstrating how much Bergoglio did to protect many persons at the time."

He said the accusations against the new pope were made long ago "by anti-clerical left-wing elements to attack the church. They must be firmly rejected."

The harsh denunciation was typical of a Vatican that often reacts defensively when it feels under attack, even though its response served to give the story legs for another day.

It interrupted the generally positive reception Francis has enjoyed since his election as pope on Wednesday, when even his choice of footwear — his old black shoes rather than the typical papal red — was noted as a sign of his simplicity and humility.

There was one clearly unscripted moment Friday, when the 76-year-old Francis stumbled briefly during an audience with the cardinals, but he quickly recovered. And for the second day in a row, Francis slipped out of the Vatican walls, this time to visit an ailing Argentine cardinal, Jorge Mejia, who suffered a heart attack Wednesday and was in the hospital.

This upbeat narrative of a people's pope who named himself after the nature-loving St. Francis of Assisi has clashed with accusations stemming from Bergoglio's past.

The worst allegation is that as the military junta took over in 1976, he withdrew support for two Jesuit priests whose work in the slums of Buenos Aires had put them in direct contact with the leftist guerrilla movement advocating armed revolution. The priests were then kidnapped and tortured inside a clandestine center at the Navy Mechanics School.

Bergoglio said he had told the priests — Orlando Yorio and Francisco Jalics — to give up their slum work for their own safety, and they refused. Yorio later accused Bergoglio of effectively delivering them to the death squads by declining to publicly endorse their work. Yorio died in Uruguay in 2000.

Jalics, who had maintained silence about the events, issued a statement Friday saying he spoke with Bergoglio years later and the two celebrated Mass together and hugged "solemnly."

"I am reconciled to the events and consider the matter to be closed," he said.

Bergoglio told his official biographer, Sergio Rubin, in 2010, that he had gone to extraordinary, behind-the-scenes lengths to save the men.

The Jesuit leader persuaded the family priest of feared dictator Jorge Videla to call in sick so Bergoglio could say Mass instead and take the opportunity to successfully appeal for their release, Rubin wrote.

Lombardi said the airing of the accusations following Francis' election was "characterized by a campaign that's often slanderous and defamatory."

Earlier this week, Lombardi issued a similar denunciation of an advocacy group for victims of sexual abuse, accusing it of using the media spotlight on the conclave to try to publicize old accusations against cardinals. The accusations, Lombardi said, are baseless and the cardinals deserve everyone's "esteem."

The accusations against Bergoglio were fanned by Horacio Verbitzky, an investigative journalist who was a leftist militant in the 1970s and is now closely aligned with the government. He has written extensively about the accusations in Argentina's Pagina12 newspaper, a left-wing daily known for advocacy journalism.

Adolfo Perez Esquivel, who won the 1980 Nobel Peace Prize for documenting the junta's atrocities, said this week that "Bergoglio was no accomplice of the dictatorship."

"Perhaps he didn't have the courage of other priests, but he never collaborated with the dictatorship," Esquivel said on Buenos Aires' Radio de la Red.

Argentine political analyst Ignacio Fidanza concurred.

"What they're demanding is that during the dictatorship he should have planted himself in the Plaza de Mayo and shouted against it," he told The Associated Press. "It was probably more effective to speak in silence, since it was an extreme situation."

Human rights investigators in Argentina have been unable to document anything regarding Bergoglio's actions during the junta years, other than the allegations concerning the Jesuits and that he failed to help a family find their murdered daughter's illegally adopted baby.

But activists are also angry that as leader of the Argentine church, he has never acknowledged or apologized for what they describe as the church's active institutional support of the military government, said Gaston Chillier, who tracks the country's human rights cases as director of the Center for Legal and Social Studies.

The church was so deeply in league with the dictators that when the Inter-American Human Rights Commission came for an inspection in 1979, the Argentine navy moved many detainees to an island owned by the diocese during the visit.

"He is responsible during Argentina's period of democracy for continuing a cover-up," Chillier told the AP. "His knowledge of these cases clearly shows that he cannot deny the torture and the systematic theft of babies."

Bergoglio testified in 2010 that he didn't know anything about baby thefts until well after the dictatorship.

Since Bergoglio became archbishop in 1998, his church has issued several apologies for failing to do more to protect people from violence that came from both the right and the left. The latest, in October 2012, was the most forceful, and it also, for the first time, asked Catholics to come forward with whatever evidence they may have to support Argentina's human rights trials.

But Chillier says Bergoglio could have done more to make the church help identify children and the bodies of detainees as well as identify those responsible for atrocities.

"It's one thing to acknowledge what you failed to do, but another entirely to apologize for what you actually did," Chillier said.

___

Warren and Almudena Calatrava contributed from Buenos Aires. David Rising in Berlin contributed.

___

Documentary lays bare Morton's wrongful conviction

In this Feb. 4, 2013 file photo, Michael Morton, freed in 2011 after spending 25 years in prison for a murder he did not commit, takes the stand in the Georgetown Courthouse in Austin, Texas. In "An Unreal Dream" writer/director and two-time Oscar-nominee Al Reinert offers an unflinching look at Morton, a Texas man who was wrongfully convicted of killing his wife and had his only son disown him as he served a life sentence (AP Photo/Austin American-Statesman, Ricardo Brazziell, Pool, File)

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Handcuffed and being bundled into a police car after his conviction for killing his wife, Michael Morton called out to a nearby cluster of reporters.