Nancy Wood's quixotic battle is a stark illustration of an Orange County system that leaves homeless people in Catch-22 situations.
One night in February 2020, police officers asked Nancy Wood to leave the park in Fountain Valley where she slept.
Homeless people rarely fight minor criminal charges all the way to trial. It’s easier to settle the case and bed down in a less visible spot.Wood’s battle is a product of her natural stubbornness and her craving for safety and privacy, as well as the comfort she finds in park regulars who talk with her and sometimes bring her food and gifts. One person offered a portable power supply, worth nearly a thousand dollars, for Christmas.
Nancy Wood talks about how Fountain Valley police dragged her out of her tent in the middle of the night, handcuffed her, and took her to jail numerous times for living in a tent in a Fountain Valley park. Fountain Valley is a bedroom community of about 55,000 with the motto “A nice place to live.” As in the rest of Orange County, residents who moved there for a manicured suburban lifestyle are grappling with a small but visible homeless population.
She applies her art school training — she says she studied portraiture in the early 1970s — to sketch passersby. Sitting in a lawn chair, she keeps a distance, so her subjects don’t usually know she is drawing them. She puts a pen to lined notebook paper for hours, just for the pleasure of it. She said her descent into homelessness began about 20 years ago after she was assaulted by men she described as police officers in the Santa Ana area.
In 2017, she landed at Mile Square Park, a 607-acre expanse of athletic fields, golf course, open space, trails and lakes. She was previously on a waiting list for housing but missed appointments because of her legal woes with the city, she said. She was told it could take up to eight years to get another spot.
She has prosecuted several people who are not homeless for being in Mile Square park after hours, she said. Wood’s case was the first to go to trial involving an unhoused person sleeping at parks in Fountain Valley, but it may not be the last. At least two other cases with similar circumstances are ongoing, Maher said.
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