Dennis the Menace's lawsuit forced change in law
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BY DEENA WINTER / Lincoln Journal Star
Dennis Van De Mark Sr. is panhandling outside the north Wal-Mart, and he’s having a very good day.
He’s flying a sign.
“Homeless, looking for work, anything helps” is scrawled in marker.
“The generous people of Lincoln” offer him work, food, clothes, drinks and $55 in less than an hour.
Then the cops show up.
Dennis gets a ticket for panhandling. He’s asked to take a breathalyzer because he has “beer breath.”
It’s August 2003, and it’s illegal to panhandle in Lincoln.
But Dennis is about to change all that.
February 2004
Under the city’s old begging ordinance, “You couldn’t say anything to anybody,” Dennis said.
He did anyway.
A few months after he was busted near Wal-Mart, a guy at the People’s City Mission told him about a Chicago lawsuit in which a federal judge declared panhandling legal.
Representing himself, Dennis sued the city of Lincoln in February 2004, challenging the constitutionality of its panhandling ordinance.
Richard Anderson, legal adviser to the Lincoln Police Department, researched case law and concluded Dennis was right. So he filed a motion in federal court saying “mea culpa, mea culpa, mea culpa … we’ve taken steps to correct.”
Dennis can recite the May 2004 Journal Star headline word for word: “Begging just got easier.”
Now, two years later, Dennis has more competition on the streets.
“Everybody’s doing it now,” he says.
Winter 2005
Dennis sits on the sidewalk at the corner of 14th and P streets.
After a few months’ absence, he’s returned to the alleys and parking garages and street corners he calls home.
He’s back to borrowing markers and cardboard from businesses so he can make a sign that might say “anything helps” or “God bless,” depending upon his mood. Back to hustling change from people scurrying to work or classes or lunch.
His only belongings are what he has on his back: a blue cotton jacket, brown jacket, white T-shirt and dirty jeans and hiking boots.
A few weeks ago, a downtown bike cop took him to detox, but he only stayed a couple of days because they wouldn’t give him cigarettes.
He’s moving more slowly than he used to. He walks with a limp and can scarcely cross P Street before the “walk” light changes.
“Beaten within an inch of his life” is how the police chief describes what happened to Dennis.
That didn’t stop him from returning to the scene of the crime.
Summer 2006
Dennis is at his usual spot at the 14th and P; his friend is cater-corner across the intersection.
They’re both flying signs.
Dennis’ sign says, “Homeless. Anything helps.”
Most people walk by the man in dirty jeans and Husker windbreaker. His teeth are yellow and sporadic; his face has the look of a thousand straight days in the sun.
They pretend he isn’t there or look at him with pity, disgust or indifference.
Two Native men — one tall and thin with long hair and pockmarked skin, the other short and pudgy — stop to tell him in hushed tones that Diane is on the other end of the block, and she’s not faring well.
“Already?” Dennis says. An hour earlier, she’d been sitting on this very corner, laughing and hollering at the lunch crowd.
He scrambles up, grabs his silver cane and limps down the sidewalk.
Diane is sprawled on her back on a concrete slab across the street from the Children’s Museum. Her jeans are unzipped and she doesn’t appear to be wearing underwear.
“Diane!” Dennis says.
She gets up, eyes half-open, tousled blond hair held back by a handkerchief. She smiles dreamily, talks in hushed tones to Dennis.
He wants to get back to his corner but promises to come back later.
She’s standing now. He tries to leave, but she’s begging him to help her zip her pants.
“Zip it yourself,” he says. “Inhale.”
Finally, he gives in and tries to help her, even though he can barely stand up without his cane.
As Dennis returns to his corner, he’s visited by Scott, a young man with closely cropped hair and crisp, clean camouflage clothing. This morning, Scott bought Dennis the hat he’s wearing. It’s black and white and says S.W.A.T.
Scott lives on the street, too, he says. He smokes in the background while Dennis works the crowd.
Bike cop Conan Schafer shows up, greets Dennis, then knocks knuckles goodbye with him.
Behind Dennis, a squad car parks near Diane, and someone says she’s being taken away.
Dennis doesn’t notice. He’s not having a good day. All the visitors are keeping customers away.
Two days later
Downtown Lincoln is waking up — restaurant workers prepare for the lunch crowd, UNL students trudge to and from classes.
Dennis has been up for hours. When the sun rises and the buses begin to run and traffic picks up, he has little choice in the matter.
He won’t say where he slept last night; it’s a detail he keeps to himself. He doesn’t want his few belongings to get stolen.
“You kinda have to use your noodle … and hide stuff,” he said.
He sleeps in parking garages, stairwells, streets and parking lots.
He’s nursing a coffee from Amigo’s, sitting on a concrete divider in the parking lot with his friend.
They know what people think: They’re drunks. They spend all their time and energy hustling just enough money to get drunk.
And well, yes, they do drink, and they do get drunk.
But their priority is food, they say, then cigarettes. If there’s any money left after that, booze.
College kids get so drunk they have to be carried out of downtown bars, Dennis says, but a homeless person who takes one sip in public is liable to get ticketed.
So far this year, Police Chief Tom Casady says, Dennis has been arrested 21 times: 18 times for drinking in public, once for trespassing and twice on warrants. During three of the arrests, he was charged with refusing to comply with police.
Dennis just got out of jail after doing 11 days for seven counts of drinking alcohol in public. He sat out $660 in fines.
“I was enjoying the break,” he says.
Yes, he’s an alcoholic. Yes, he drinks every day — usually beer, sometimes a half-pint of vodka, because it’s easier to conceal — but he doesn’t consider himself a hard-core drinker.
It’s tough to get a job when you’re homeless and don’t have a car, and after the assault, he says, “I couldn’t even get a job flippin’ pancakes.”
The police are just looking for excuses to hassle people like him, Dennis and other homeless people say, get them off the streets and get business owners off their backs. Tell that to Jesus, they say.
“Jesus said, ‘The poor you will have with you always,’” Dennis says.
So Lincoln may as well get used to having him around, because he isn’t planning on going anywhere.
Except maybe to his corner at 14th and P. It’s nearly 11 a.m., prime time for panhandling. Besides, a cop just materialized across the street, and Dennis’ friend has disappeared down the alley.
That was then
Dennis is what the police chief calls a “frequent flier.”
He’s what some downtown dwellers consider customer repellent.
Dennis has lived in California most of his life, but his mom’s from Nebraska. He moved to Grand Island in the ’70s to be near family.
He says he used to make good money putting up metal buildings, garages and grain bins. He had a wife, two sons, two daughters and a home, but his drinking drove a wedge between them and drove him to the streets. Now he’s hard-pressed to remember his kids’ ages.
“It hasn’t been an easy life,” he says.
For awhile, he slept in a dumpster filled with cardboard next to Eddy’s Fast Gas & Food in Grand Island, then in a shack fashioned out of a box beside the store.
Eddy’s owner, Gary Starostka, said Dennis would come into the store for coffee and talk for hours.
But people talk in a small town, and Dennis felt he was an embarrassment to his family, especially his teenage daughters.
“Being poor is not an easy thing,” he says. “You don’t like to embarrass your family.”
He wasn’t familiar with Lincoln, but he was drawn to the city about four years ago after hearing about its soup kitchens and shelters.
“That’s why a lot of people live in Lincoln, because of places like Matt Talbot,” he says. “It’s a survival element.”
Dennis says most street people he knows are “displaced,” have family problems and can’t find work. They drink to get rid of the pain.
“You get depressed,” he explains. “It’s just something that they turn to to make themselves feel better.”
After moving to Lincoln, he began panhandling and spent a lot of time at the DayWatch shelter at 23rd and R streets. He’d watch TV, smoke cigarettes, play cards, drink coffee, eat doughnuts. But the shelter closed in mid-2004.
Dennis figured out a way to spend a night indoors — get drunk on vodka, gin or whiskey and get hauled into detox, where he knows he’ll get a sandwich, juice, mat and blanket, maybe a free pair of socks.
And thus began his cycle in and out of jail, detox and shelters, a cycle that always ends on the streets.
This is now
Dennis has become something of a curbside lawyer on Lincoln’s panhandling ordinance.
Here’s what you do:
* Borrow a marker and a piece of cardboard from a business and make a sign. Write “homeless” or “need help” or “anything helps” or “God bless” or “thank you.”
* Stay at least 20 feet from ATMs.
* Stay away from bus stops.
* Don’t flat out ask for money — although his advice here is a bit shaky because Lincoln’s ordinance doesn’t prohibit that.
The bar crowd can be pretty generous, but Dennis is sometimes too trashed to fly a sign by closing time.
He has his war stories: He laughs about the time he asked a passer-by for change and got $10. He says he once made $50 in one day by helping build a pole barn.
Wal-Mart is the best place to panhandle, he says, because so many people come and go.
“I can make $100 on a good day.”
Especially around the holidays or on rainy days.
“I’ll make more on a bad weather day than a sunny day,” he says. “People are sympathetic.”
He uses the nickels and dimes and quarters and occasional bills to buy food, tobacco and alcohol. He can’t afford to pay $2 to $4 for a pack of cigarettes, so he rolls his own with “Midnight Special” tobacco.
Lately, he’s been panhandling for more food money. He’s been avoiding the soup kitchen since the assault.
Lincoln’s homeless sleep in alleys, parks, deserted houses, cars and construction sites, he says.
“When it’s snowing out and it’s colder than hell … I’ll make myself a little nest in there,” he says, motioning toward a parking garage.
The mission is a last resort because he’s one of Lincoln’s homeless who doesn’t like the rules and the religion.
“They’ve outgrown that. They’re not little kids going to Sunday school anymore.”
October 2005
Dennis is a defiant defender of Lincoln’s street people, and he’ll often remind shop owners and cops of his rights, or perceived rights.
If the city tries to ban panhandling downtown, he says, he’ll go to court again.
“They ain’t gonna run us out of town,” he says. “Where are they gonna send us? New Orleans? You can’t outlaw homelessness. It’s like they say in the Bible. Jesus said, ‘The poor you will have with you always.’”
He admits that even if he were offered a place to live with any treatment he might need, he’d probably choose to live on the street.
But last October, he found out life on the street can be dangerous.
He says he was passed out in the open-air stairwell of the former Douglas 3 theater at 13th and P.
“They really kicked my head in pretty good,” he says.
According to the police chief, two people flagged down police at at 1:30 in the morning after seeing Dennis bleeding from the head. John L. Sewell, 28, and Jim Vasques, 42, two homeless men found in a nearby alley, were arrested and charged with assault.
Dennis pleads ignorance as to why the men beat him up, but bike cop Schafer, says they were Dennis’ friends.
“I heard somebody was defending a woman’s honor,” Schafer says.
John Sewell recently was sentenced to four to five years in prison and Jim Vasques 10 to 15 years for the beating. Dennis says they should’ve been charged with attempted murder.
He doesn’t know how long he was unconscious, but he was in the hospital for two months. His “caved-in” eye required reconstructive surgery. His brain was hemorrhaging and some of his friends say his mind isn’t the same, although he’s not so sure.
He says he either still had the will to live, or he was too stubborn to die.
After he was released from the hospital, he says, his estranged wife took him to a nursing home in Grand Island and then to another in Central City.
“There was no way I was going back to that Central City facility,” he says. “They wouldn’t leave me alone for a minute.”
When they returned to Lincoln for a hearing in December, Dennis got out of the car and his wife went to park in a garage downtown.
“I just hit the alleyway,” he says, his face lighting up at the memory.
And that’s where he’s been since.
Reach Deena Winter at 473-2642 or dwinter@journalstar.com.
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