Unhoused evicted from large westside camp Thursday in Bloomington, Indiana

Members of the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office arrived at a large homeless camp behind the old west side K-Mart building Thursday morning to evict unhoused residents squatting on the land. Deputies easily outnumbered the residents still there, who scrambled to move their possessions from the camp before a noon deadline.

Workers from Centerstone, and Beacon assisted, along with volunteers from the Bloomington Homeless Coalition. Thursday’s eviction was the largest since a camp was removed from along the B-Line last August.

A camp resident, whose first name is Nancy, said she has secured housing at Crawford, but will need to wait at least a week before she can move in. In the meantime, volunteers were trying to find a place for her to stay until then.

Nancy told the Bloomingtonian, that her father, who has cancer, had stopped at the camp to help in the past couple of days. Nancy shared a tent with a man named Caleb, who also goes by the nickname “Nomad.” Caleb said he has a brain tumor, and not much longer to live, and he’ll be lucky if he lives to see his daughter’s 18th birthday.

Caleb told the Bloomingtonian on May 18th that he had no plans to leave the camp, but he was wanted on a warrant. Camp residents said Caleb was arrested in the following days when officials arrived to hand out eviction notices. The notices gave residents until noon Thursday, June 2, 2022, to vacate. Anybody still at the camp, would face arrest.

Caleb said people would come and go at the camp, sometimes he’d see them again, sometimes he wouldn’t, and sometimes they died. He said he has noticed that even those who manage to get off the potent mix of meth and fentanyl so prevalent on the streets, often just drop dead months later even though they are clean.

Thursday morning deputies from the county arrived, and by noon most of the remaining residents left taking what they could carry and leaving behind what they couldn’t. Volunteers and service workers from Centerstone and Beacon helped them.

The few unhoused people faded away while dragging what they could past rows of law enforcement vehicles parked along the At Home business, which fills the old K-Mart building.

Later the heavy equipment showed up, and a trio of men from a company that cleans up murder scenes, and other places where trauma has occurred, began placing items in the bucket of an excavator, and the items were then dumped in large dumpsters.

A few deputies stayed at the scene of the camps into the afternoon as the workers toiled to demolish the camps and haul away items left behind that appeared to be garbage.

Earlier, just before the noon deadline, a woman rolled down her window, and said, “This sucks! Where will they go?”