Tears glistened on the black and purple bruises covering 91-year-old Rodolfo Rodriguez’s face as he described being attacked by a group of people while going for a walk on the Fourth of July.
“I can’t walk anymore,” Rodriguez said in Spanish. “I’m in so much pain.”
He’ll be turning 92 in September, Rodriguez said, and he’s never been hurt like this before, in a life working the fields with cattle and corn.
He had traveled from Michoacan, Mexico, to visit his family in Willowbrook, California, a city in Los Angeles County, his grandson Erik Mendoza said.
He makes the trip about twice a year, and takes a walk through the neighborhood every day after lunch, Mendoza said. “Everyone in the neighborhood knows him already,” he said.
Rodriguez said he was walking to a nearby park on Wednesday when he passed a woman and a little girl. Without warning, the woman assaulted him, he said, hitting him with a concrete block and enlisting a group of men to join in beating him.
“I didn’t even bump into her kid,” Rodriguez said. “I just passed her and she pushed me and she hit me until she was done.”
“We are concerned, especially with the type of crime they committed,” LA County Sheriff’s Deputy D’Angelo Robinson told CNN affiliate KTLA. “There was what appears to be a 4-year-old child there who witnessed the entire thing. We can’t have these kind of people like that out in the streets.”
When reached by CNN, the LA County Sheriff’s Office confirmed the attack took place but declined to comment further, saying it would soon be issuing a formal statement.
Misbel Borjas was driving by when she saw the woman hitting Rodriguez repeatedly in the head with a concrete block, she said.
“I heard her saying, go back to your country, go back to Mexico,” she told CNN by phone. “When I tried to videotape her with my cell phone, she threw that same concrete block, tried to hit my car.”
Police are looking for the woman and four men seen in Borjas’ video, Robinson told KTLA.
Rodriguez said he doesn’t remember when the woman picked up the concrete block, but he remembers being hit repeatedly. At one point, he says, the woman ran up to a group of men nearby and told them Rodriguez was trying to take her daughter away from her — so the men joined her and started kicking him as he lay bleeding on the sidewalk, Rodriguez said.
“But that’s not true,” he said, through tears. “In the years I have been alive I have never offended anyone.”
Mendoza said his grandfather suffered a broken jaw, broken cheekbones, two broken ribs and bruises on his face, back and abdomen. He spent five or six hours in the hospital, he said.
The family has started a GoFundMe campaign to help cover Rodriguez’s medical costs.
As his grandfather laid back in a reclining chair at the family home, wearing a white T-shirt and blue plaid pajamas, Mendoza kissed him on one of the few places he hadn’t been injured: the top of his head.
“We think we have an idea (on who the suspects are) but I just want police to find them,” Mendoza said. “That’s all our family wants, justice for our grandpa.”
Rescuers in Thailand have begun the process of removing the 12 boys and their soccercoach who have been trapped in a cave for two weeks, according to the Chiang Rai governor.
Authorities said at a press conference Sunday morning in Chiang Rai province that they made the decision to rescue the boys as oxygen drops and the threat of monsoon rains approaches. Due to the length of the journey out of the cave, officials said the first boy was expected to come out at 9 p.m. local time, which is 10 a.m. Sunday Eastern time. The officials said the operation could take two or three days.
At 10 a.m. local time, 13 foreign divers and five Thai SEALs entered the cave to begin the operation. Two divers will escort each of the kids out of the cave.
“We have a fraction of a second to help them come out,” provincial Gov. Narongsak Osatanakorn said.
It will take five hours for rescuers to reach the boys from the entrance of the cave, and six hours to bring back the boys, including an hour break time.
“They insist they are ready to come out,” Narongsak said Sunday of the rescue team. “Family has already been notified.”
The most challenging part of the journey for the boys will be the first leg of the trip.
Once they make it to the third chamber, they will have one hour of rest. Then the rest of the journey will be on foot walking through muddy areas or floating in some areas.
“There are two obstacles, which are water and time,” Narongsak said. “We have tried all possible ways to get the boys out, but sometimes we can’t win over nature.”
Water levels were down 30 percent, an official said at the press conference — the lowest it’s been since the boys were located.
The officials also said they had ruled out the potential for drilling into the cave from above.
The boys are well aware of the mission involved, and the parents also understand what’s at stake, according to Narongsak.
“Experts’ assessments indicate that today is the most ready we can be,” said Choorat Panngao, Provincial Police Region 5 deputy commander. “If we don’t do it today we will lose our opportunity.”
Seasonal monsoon rains forecast to hit the region this weekend and throughout next week have yet to occur, and efforts on the ground to remove floodwater and divert water flows have been “very successful,” Osatanakorn said Saturday. Rescuers can now walk, rather than swim or dive, from the cave’s main entrance to an inner chamber serving as a command center.
“We are very happy with the water situation here,” he said. “The perfect situation would be to have zero water, which is impossible. The water level would be zero during December or January, so this situation is absolutely impossible. The next best situation would be if the water level is as low as possible to move the kids.”
Despite the progress with diverting water, Narongsak said on Saturday that rescuers are struggling to maintain safe oxygen levels inside the cave.
The inner chamber where rescuers have set up a “forward operating base” now has low oxygen levels due to the amount of people inside. They have tried pumping “pure air” through a tube into the chamber, but have also had to pull back nonessential personnel in an effort to preserve oxygen, according to Narongsak.
Officials said they were drilling all day Saturday to transport the children to the hospital once brought out of the cave.
“We are preparing for air evacuations in two different places,” Choorat said. “Additionally we have 13 ambulances standing by.”
ABC News’ Rex Sakamoto contributed to this report.
Jenyffer Ortiz, like some of the 1,700 other homeless evacuees who fled Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria last September, did not wait to be checked out of their temporarily subsidized hotel rooms, as per the deadline last Saturday set by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
She vacated her double room last Friday in New York without knowing where she and her kids were going to sleep next. She had no way of knowing a lawsuit would be filed by families like hers and civil rights groups just before the deadline, keeping evacuees in their hotel rooms for a few more days until a formal hearing could be held Monday.
But Puerto Rican evacuees like her were granted a fifth extension to remain in their FEMA-sponsored motels and hotels until July 23, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday. The extension came after another federal judge issued a temporary restraining order blocking the agency from ending its Transitional Sheltering Assistance (TSA) program on June 30, the program’s fourth and seemingly final end date.
Ortiz, 48, spent three nights in a shelter near Times Square with her son and daughter before gathering their belongings in plastic bags and shopping carts. With the help of local relief organizers, they returned to her hotel near Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. She didn’t plan on unpacking.
A childhood friend and fellow evacuee helps Jenyffer Ortiz pack her belongings into a car. (Photo: Kadia Tubman/Yahoo News)
While Tuesday’s extension offered displaced Puerto Ricans some relief, the respite from instability is only temporary. Housing assistance will continue for two weeks until a final order is issued on whether or not TSA will be further extended. Meanwhile, displaced families face the challenge of navigating ill-suited shelter systems or finding permanent housing.
“The biggest challenge facing the evacuee population in this city is they can’t get housing without a job, and you can’t get a job without secure housing,” said Peter Gudaitis, executive director of New York Disaster Interfaith Services (NYDIS), an organization that’s been providing resources, case management and advocacy for evacuees since they began to arrive last fall.
“So there are a lot of them in this sort of Catch-22,” he continued. “Plus, any family that has kids in school wants a job and housing near where their kids are enrolled. So getting a job is not their only need.”
Jenyffer Ortiz cooks chicken in a rice cooker in the hotel bathroom, where there is counter space. She cooks for herself to better deal with diabetes and other ailments. (Photo: David “Dee” Delgado for Yahoo News)
According to NYDIS, more than 100 Puerto Rican families live in FEMA hotels in New York City, but about 900 displaced families are staying with relatives and more than 200 are navigating the shelter system, with difficulty.
Those in TSA shelters “are not chronically homeless people that are used to living on public assistance,” said Gudaitis. “These [displaced people] were homeowners and renters in Puerto Rico. They’re not used to the way the shelter system works for the chronically homeless or the mentally ill.”
Ortiz left Puerto Rico in December, three months after Hurricane Maria crashed into the island, directly or indirectly killing hundreds of people and decimating the U.S. territory’s power grid. Without electricity, she couldn’t refrigerate her insulin to treat her diabetes. “I feared dying,” said Ortiz. When she arrived to New York, she went to a shelter because she wasn’t aware of the FEMA temporary housing program. Eventually she relocated to a Holiday Inn through TSA, and for six months she grew accustomed to living in the hotel, switching rooms every 30 days according to hotel cleaning policy.
Jenyffer Ortiz takes 14 different medications daily. (Photo: David “Dee” Delgado for Yahoo News)
While deadlines for leaving the hotel approached and were extended, Ortiz made a home for herself and her children, cooking complete meals from a rice cooker in her bathroom and baking flan in her microwave. Her daughter enrolled in a nearby school and her son searched for work. She found a physician she could reach without traveling too far on her wooden cane. She knew where to do laundry and grocery shopping.
“After Maria,” said Ortiz, “You have a new life.”
The Ortiz family had been at the hotel for six months when the June 30 deadline came. They left for a shelter in a different part of the city where food cost more and transportation was farther away. The hardest change for Ortiz was the shelter rules, including a curfew and ban on electric appliances like her rice cooker.
She kept in contact with the Holiday Inn manager and asked to return to her room, which he granted. Gudaitis, who has supported displaced families like hers, says he understands why families will immediately take up the chance to stay in a commercial hotel paid for by FEMA. But he recommends against moving back. “It’s really like kicking the can down the road for themselves, and they’re restarting their clock,” explained Gudaitis. “Leaving the hotel actually delays some of the entitlements you’re able to access when you’re in the shelter system.”
Back in a familiar place, Ortiz admitted that she questions if leaving Puerto Rico was the right decision. Her daughter was bullied in the nearby school and her son doesn’t speak English. In the near future, Ortiz said she wants to get a job to give her kids a stable life. “I still feel useful,” she said. “Even with my medical condition.”
Jennifer Ortiz’s daughter, Valerie Rivera, in their Bronx hotel room on July 3. (Photo: David “Dee” Delgado for Yahoo News)
If FEMA stops providing temporary accommodation, evacuees will have two options: stay mainland and figure out housing — including homeless shelters — before July 23, or stay until Aug. 30 and have FEMA pay for a one-way ticket back to Puerto Rico.
Meanwhile, civil rights groups and TSA recipients are taking FEMA to court.
“What we’re asking for is what is fair,” said Kira Romero-Craft, managing attorney of LatinoJustice PRLDEF, the national civil rights organization that filed the lawsuit against FEMA. “The families that are fighting for [TSA] are families that are fighting for their rights. It’s nothing that hasn’t already been extended for others who have faced similar instances. What we’ve seen in the past is that other communities that have been affected by natural disasters — like Hurricane Maria, like Hurricane Katrina, like Hurricane Harvey — is that the rebuilding process is long-term and FEMA assistance has been up to 26 months. What these families are fighting for has been offered in the past to similarly situated American citizens.”
Jenyffer Ortiz opens her door at the Holiday Inn Express in the Bronx. (Photo: David ‘Dee’ Delgado for Yahoo News)
Following Saturday and Tuesday’s extension news, LatinoJustice set out to inform displaced families that they could remain in their FEMA hotels — if they hadn’t already checked out. “We had families who had to leave, who took the return trip to Puerto Rico, or didn’t hear over the news and had to make other arrangements,” said Romero-Craft. “We’re working with the different officials to transition everyone back who desperately needs the assistance to get them in a safe place.”
Nearly 300 days after Hurricane Maria, Ortiz has no intention to return to Puerto Rico anytime soon — even if that means facing the possibility of being put into another shelter come July 23. “I need a good shelter,” she said. “A shelter where I can cook my food and keep my children safe.”
