Jose Luis Camargo wants to avoid becoming a statistic.
The 55-year-old, who is disabled, has severe abdominal pain and an untreated hernia. He’s grown emaciated during the roughly three months he’s lived under an elevated ramp linking the 110 Freeway to the 105 in Harbor Gateway North.
Before he lived in this small encampment of makeshift dwellings along active railroad tracks, Camargo spent about nine months in a shantytown under a stretch of the 105.
Today, he sleeps on a blanket-lined cot inside a small, boxy structure he built out of cardboard, curtain rods, various fabrics and a chain-link fence that doubles as the bones of the back wall. A sheet of sheer mesh draped over an oversized Maxine Waters campaign sign serves as his roof.
Tucked away next to his cot, Camargo keeps a pump-action air rifle to fend off rats and two machetes for assailants.
Read more at Los Angeles Times.