No Riding Rails for Him; Police Buy Ticket to L.A.

This evening, a little past 8, an amiable, bearded man with a taste for white clothing and Coca-Cola is likely to join Los Angeles’ downtown homeless population.

He will hobble off a bus from Jacksonville, Fla., where police plucked him from the streets he has inhabited for years and bought him a one-way, discount ticket to the City of Angels.

His name is James Riggs. Jacksonville police say they were simply helping him get where he wanted to go.

“They talked to Mr. Riggs and he expressed interest in going back to California but he didn’t have the funds,” said Micheal Edwards, chief of the Traffic/Special Enforcement Division in the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office. “I think it was something commendable. . . . This is money they took out of their pockets to buy this gentleman a ticket.”

But the Rev. Linda Standifer, a Jacksonville Methodist minister who has helped Riggs for five years, suspects that police were simply trying to export a social problem. She said the L.A.-bound passenger is mentally ill and to her knowledge has no friends or family in Southern California.

The incident is reminiscent of a case that drew national headlines more than a decade ago when Florida shipped another of its unpopular citizens here.

In that episode, Florida officials gave a prostitute with a long arrest record the choice of prison or a one-way plane ticket to Los Angeles. She took the ticket and wound up in a Santa Monica courtroom on prostitution charges.

Standifer allows that Riggs once told her he wanted to go to Los Angeles, but notes that he mentioned a lot of other places as well.

Thus she wonders whether the officers’ generosity was spurred by their desire to nudge downtown development by clearing the area of homeless people. She said Riggs had been picked up five times by police who started to enforce a local ordinance against sleeping in public.

“It wasn’t right for him to be outside . . . but at least [in Jacksonville] he had people who cared about him and he was relatively safe,” Standifer said.

She described Riggs as an eccentric, likable Vietnam veteran who once had drug problems but is now “on Jesus.”

He spent his days sitting outside the downtown Jacksonville building from which she runs an urban ministry. At night he would sleep in the building’s alcove. He bathed in the fountains of a local park. He never asked people for money, instead saying “God bless you” and “Praise the Lord.”

He is annoyingly selective in his tastes. He drinks Coca-Cola, but not Pepsi. And he only wants to wear white, shunning clothing donations with colored stitching or labels. Though Riggs’ pickiness irritated Standifer, she eventually gave in and last year sewed an all-white outfit for him.

“He really did look like an angel until it turned dirty,” she recalled.

Wednesday morning, three police officers appeared outside her building with new clothes for Riggs: tan pants, a polyester plaid jacket and a wrinkled shirt.

“They got ‘em these really ugly clothes--nothing white--and he put ‘em on. I couldn’t believe it,” Standifer exclaimed, amazed at Riggs’ sudden loss of sartorial standards.

After he matter-of-factly told Standifer that the officers were sending him to Los Angeles, she got him a wheelchair (he can walk but his legs are weak). Then she watched as the police, two of them in a golf cart, followed Riggs in his wheelchair for the seven blocks to the bus station.

There, the Greyhound terminal manager said, police bought a $73.50 ticket--discounted because Riggs had a letter from the Salvation Army. Baggage workers boxed his plastic bags of possessions and put Riggs and his wheelchair on the 1:45 p.m.

Edwards dismissed the suggestion that his officers wanted to rid themselves of a homeless problem. On any given day, he said, there are hundreds of homeless on Jacksonville streets and exporting one wouldn’t put much of a dent in the population.

Standifer was struck Wednesday by how odd her building looked after so many years of having Riggs camped outside. “It really looks bare out there,” she said.

If Riggs stays on the bus until he reaches Los Angeles, he will end his trip much as he began it, amid the homeless.

“I don’t think one more guy is going to kill us,” said Mike Edwards, president of the Los Angeles Mission, which serves some of the estimated 11,000 to 15,000 homeless who frequent the downtown area.