Another attack on a homeless victim for the heck of it-- but this time making kids do it.

Attacks against the homeless, just on a lark and for no reason at all, are nothing new (tragically), and I've discussed them before. But today there is a story out of Florida that brings this crime to a new low: ten year olds pushed into beating homeless man.

(CNN) -- Egged on by a 17-year-old, two 10-year-old boys joined in the attack of a homeless man, leaving him bruised and bloody Tuesday, Daytona Beach Police said.

The incident highlights an upswing in violent crime across the U.S. against the homeless.

In 2006, there were 142 attacks and 20 murders, several involving teenagers seeking a vicious thrill, according to the D.C.-based National Coalition for the Homeless.

The incident, which took place in Daytona Beach, Florida, may make history, said the non-profit's acting executive director Michael Stoops.

"If we're talking about 10-year-olds, that means we've hit an all-time low," said Stoops. "The youngest person to have ever been arrested for a crime like this is 13....

Daytona Police Sgt. Billy Walden said the teen and two boys were walking in their neighborhood around 9 p.m. when they saw 58-year-old John D'Amico. They began throwing rocks at the homeless man.

The 17-year-old, Jeremy Woods, punched D'Amico who then fell over a concrete wall. As he lay on the ground, one of the 10-year-olds - whose names are not being released - used parts of the concrete to bash D'Amico in the head, a police report shows.

D'Amico's eye was severely damaged in the attack. Woods and the two boys were charged with felony aggravated battery and are being held without bond at a juvenile detention center in Daytona Beach, Walden said.

There was one good piece of news in the story though. In one of several posts I've done on this topic, Kill some time, kill a man I wrote about the brutal January 2006 murder of Norris Gaynor who was beaten to death with baseball bats for 'sport'. In the story linked above, it says later on (after noting that apparently Florida has an unusually high number of these kinds of cases-- though as I wrote about the suspects in the Phoenix serial shooter cases random recreational violence, Arizona is hardly immune from this kind of stuff) that

One of those cases has garnered international attention and is expected to go to trial this fall after a surveillance camera captured two teens beating a homeless man with bats in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on January 12, 2006.

Prosecutors say 17-year-old skateboarder Tom Daugherty, 18-year-old Brian Hooks, a popular hockey team captain, and a [third] teen, Billy Ammons, a high school dropout, assaulted two more homeless men that night.

And that is a piece of good news, that they have caught and are prosecuting these monsters.

Murder is always a crime of unspeakable violence.

And there is no motive for murder that justifies the crime. However, the motives that there have been in the past, if wrong, could at least be understood as being motives for murder. Money, passion, jealousy, personal rivalry, revenge, rage, organized crime or gang feuds, turf battles, sadistic sexual desire, paranoia, misplaced patriotism, to send a message to someone else, even things like blind racial, ethnic or religious hatred, or homophobia, all of these motives, if inadequate for the crime, fit our frame of reference as motives for the ultimate crime.

But with the dehumanization of the homeless, we see more and more attacks, nearly always by juveniles, just for the heck of it. I don't understand it. In nearly all of these cases, the attackers have been white, and in nearly all of these cases they have come from middle or upper-middle class families. So why would they feel that they need to kill someone who has nothing?

It is no secret that some of the attackers have watched videos like 'bumfights,' a video in which 300,000 copies were distributed in which homeless people were paid to fight each other in front of a camera. Do they feel that these homeless people are only fodder for them to take out aggression on?

Or could it be perhaps that they have bought into the line that homeless people have earned their lot in life by themselves and are not deserving of any better fate?
That the homeless people are not as good as they are?

As I wrote in the Phoenix case (and which also appears to be true in the Gaynor case, and is true most of the time in these cases:

both suspects apparently came from families in which they never experienced poverty, and so apparently bought into the misconception of transients as all being that way by choice or because they were lazy.

And with that, can it be all that surprising that some disturbed people have taken homelessness as a license to murder human beings with no more compunction than most people might kill a garden pest?

Republicans claim living on the street is a 'choice.'

It's tough being homeless. Last week I reported on the dumping of a homeless paraplegic out onto the street with no wheelchair in Los Angeles by Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center. Today another shocking story comes out of San Francisco. And this time it highlights the hazard that people on the edge of society often face simply because they are easy targets.

Homeless woman burned to death in revenge for reporting to the police that she had been beaten and robbed.

SAN FRANCISCO - Two women were accused of soaking a homeless, drug-addicted prostitute with gasoline and burning her to death after she reported that one of them had robbed her.

Leslie "Jill" May, 49, was abducted from the street and killed at Candlestick Park the day she told the police that Mia Sagote, 30, robbed and beat her over a debt May's boyfriend owed, authorities said.

May's boyfriend owed money. So she was robbed to pay the debt. That already makes the case that homeless people can be a target, even for situations they haven't created. But then when she told the police-- well, we see what kind of people target them in the first place.

The irony is contained in the last paragraph of the story:

After being selected for a city program that tries to find services and housing for the chronically homeless, she got a place to live in the fall.

"She was permanently housed," Amyes said. "She was happy. She was successful. They were little baby steps. The average American would say that's nothing ... but to live inside successfully for six months was huge."

So she was moving ahead with her life. Until it was brutally snuffed out. Like so many, many others that we don't hear about.

Paraplegic dumped in skid row by hospital. Without a wheelchair.

Sadly, this isn't the first time I've had to blog on Los Angeles hospitals' unique way of dealing with the homeless. In fact, in my second post on the topic, just this past October, I wrote about how this practice had become the target of a criminal investigation.

How would you like to be discharged from the hospital, still in pain or not completely well, and dropped off someplace where you did not come from, perhaps didn't know where you were, and among people who you did not know? If someone-- homeless or not-- requests to be taken downtown, then it is fine to take them there. But absent such a request, discharge from a hospital is just that-- they can walk out the front door.

We also know that some of the homeless dumped on skid row 'paid' their hospital bill another way-- apparently being abducted, murdered and their bodies 'donated' to UCLA medical center in the infamous UCLA cadaver scandal.

But a story out today makes even that nauseating turn of events seem like old news:

a homeless paraplegic was dumped on skid row by an L.A. hospital:

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- A hospital van dropped off a paraplegic man on Skid Row, allegedly leaving him crawling in the street with nothing more than a soiled gown and a broken colostomy bag, police said.

Witnesses who said they saw the incident Thursday wrote down a phone number on the van and took down its license-plate number, which helped detectives connect the vehicle to Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center, the Los Angeles Times reported on its Web site.

Police said the incident was a case of "homeless dumping" and were questioning officials from the hospital.

Outrage is too mild a word for what I felt when I read this story. No matter how horrid some of these stories have gotten, it's always possible to think 'well, there is still something left they won't do.' Get a hint: NO, there is nothing they won't do. If they will even toss a paralyzed hospital patient out onto the street, then these goons will do anything. In fact, this should be prosecuted as a hate crime.

I know that hospitals lose a ton of money treating the indigent (welcome to America 2007, even as our President submits a budget that calls for another round of cuts in Medicaid) but if this is the best they can do, then there is indeed a strong argument for not just increasing Medicaid payments on behalf of the indigent, but in fact just plain nationalizing some hospitals (this one would be a prime candidate). Obviously the Presbyterian Church (which apparently has lent its name to the medical center) is incapable of running an institution that shows even the most minimal level of decency.