By Jana Kadah
Bay City News Foundation
The Sunday night stabbing at San Jose's Grace Baptist Church left two people dead, three seriously injured and the community wondering who's to blame for the tragic killings and whether or not it could've been prevented.
Two of the three survivors -- volunteer and city employee Nguyen Pham and church staffer James Chaney -- said the stabbings could've been averted, but they are not blaming the man who stabbed them.
Instead, Pham, Chaney and other advocates for the unhoused community believe the stabbing is a result of decades-worth of negligence and failing policies that forced unhoused residents to be left with little-to-no resources.
They are the same policies that stabbing suspect, 32-year-old homeless resident Fernando Lopez, was also the victim of, Shaunn Cartwright, veteran homelessness advocate and founder of Unhoused Response Group, said.
"Advocates have been warning local officials for years about the inadequacy of housing, shelter, addiction and mental health treatment for our lowest income residents," Cartwright said in a news release sponsored by the San Jose/Silicon Valley NAACP, Affordable Housing Network of Santa Clara County and other housing advocacy groups. "It is a miracle that more violence has not erupted from the neglect and intolerable conditions that so many of our houseless neighbors are forced to live in."
Cartwright met Lopez through her years-long work with Grace Baptist Church and as a result also developed friendships with Pham and Chaney -- men she described as "lights," and "twin souls who had a deep-rooted desire to serve their community."
"When I spoke to Nguyen and James (after the stabbing), they both said they were not blaming (Lopez), and that is significant," Cartwright said. "If the victims aren't going to cast blame on (Lopez) then maybe others who have, should look at it from a different perspective."
In fact, Cartwright was at the church working alongside Lopez, Pham and Chaney on Sunday and left 30 minutes before the stabbing occurred.
"It's so weird because after working with the unhoused community for years, usually you can tell if there are undercurrents, if someone may reach a breaking point," Cartwright said. "But I couldn't sense that with (Lopez) at all. He was kind and helpful and I even cracked a joke with him before I left."
The group was working on the annual upcoming memorial for the unhoused community and making tombstones out of foam to commemorate the lives lost on the street this last year.
Cartwright has chronicled the mortality of homeless people in Santa Clara County since 2016 and said the increased deaths have been "anything but steady or gradual."
In 2019, the number of homeless residents who died was 161 - a record high until it was broken in September 2020, according to data collected by Cartwright. She estimated that the total tally for this year will surpass 200 deaths.
She also noted that in 2020, an unhoused person dies every other day on the streets of Santa Clara County and most are people of color.
"There are 10,000 unhoused people in Santa Clara County competing for access to two emergency shelters for singles, one for families, 10 detox beds, and reduced services due to COVID. Most restroom access has been closed, as have places to rest, charge cell phones and use electronics," Cartwright's news release said.
To her and the coalition that signed on to the news release, Lopez is an apparent example of what happens when people fall through the cracks in a county that does not have safety nets to catch them.
"Fernando is a victim as well," Cartwright said. "Whatever caused this was a result of him not having nearly enough treatment and access to resources.
"The county is so fixated on building long-term housing, but people are dying in the meantime and succumbing to their addictions waiting for the permanent housing," she added. "What we need is more mental health facilities and rehab beds, more temporary shelters."
Mayor Sam Liccardo echoed similar sentiment at a Wednesday news conference - noting that it was systemic failures that apparently led Lopez to this point.
"We cannot avoid the conclusion that this was preventable. Multiple system failures led to this moment and I will begin with one failure that I will own. That is the fact that the suspect and (3) out of the five victims were unhoused," Liccardo said. "We have to do more to get our residents off the street and into dignified housing."
However, Liccardo argued that Lopez should've never been on the streets because of his previous convictions.
The defendant's criminal history has indications of drug addiction, multiple domestic-violence arrests and a 2011 conviction for assault with a deadly weapon -- his most serious charge for which he was given a two-year prison sentence, according to court records.
Lopez then stayed out of the county court system for nine years until June, when he was arrested for his third misdemeanor domestic-violence offense. Santa Clara County Judge Drew Takaichi granted Lopez supervised release on June 29 -- a move both District Attorney Jeff Rosen and San Jose Police Chief Eddie Garcia disagreed with.
However, Lopez's release was revoked nearly a month later when he failed to show up for a mandatory court hearing. The court also issued a bench warrant for his failure to appear on Tuesday, nearly three months after his release was revoked and two days after the stabbing.
But local homeless advocates who frequent Grace Baptist Church said Lopez' alleged actions were out of character and feared that it was a result of him succumbing to drug abuse.
"When you are homeless you are beaten and bruised up by so many things that it feels like drugs are the only thing that could make you feel normal or happy," homeless advocate Scott Largent said. "And drugs coupled with other personal struggles and a lack of mental health resources makes people go off the deep end or have an episode - and that's what I suspect this was."
Garcia noted that several eye-witness reports also suggested that Lopez was under the influence of drugs but he is still waiting on the toxicology results to confirm that.
However, it is Lopez's citizenship status, or lack thereof, that adds another player to the 'blame game.'
David Jennings, director of the San Francisco field office for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said the state's sanctuary policies prohibited the federal agency from doing its work, detaining Lopez and thus preventing the Sunday stabbings.
"Here we have catastrophic proof of the abject failure of California's sanctuary policies. The only person this policy protected was a criminal; permitting him to reoffend over and over again," Jennings said. "Had those immigration detainers been honored, or had ICE been notified on any of the other multiple occasions he was arrested and released from local jails, we would have taken him into custody."
Sanctuary laws revoke ICE's access to local databases and pushes ICE agents out of jails, which means that ICE agents could only know about Lopez or other undocumented defendants if local law enforcement informed the federal immigration officials.
Liccardo and Garcia maintained that Santa Clara County should remain a sanctuary county but insisted that the county change its sanctuary laws so that law enforcement could contact ICE -- a move that would align with the 2017 California Values Act in which local agencies can contact federal officials regarding undocumented immigrants charged with violent felonies.
"(The Values Act) provides a very balanced approach for protecting our law-abiding immigrants from the risk of deportation while enabling notification of federal authorities in the rare circumstances of an undocumented immigrant with a violent predatory criminal record," Liccardo said.
The San Jose duo argued the same point in 2019 following the high-profile killing of Bambi Larson and were met with notable backlash from the community and immigration advocates.
That same year, the county voted against changing the policy and county officials said the policy is likely to remain the same.
The survivors, Liccardo, Garcia and homeless advocates agree that the stabbing could've been avoided.
And while they may not agree on who/what is to blame and the next steps, they all emphasized that the undocumented, Latino and unhoused communities are certainly not responsible and shouldn't be blamed for the actions of one individual.