# Grim details emerge in death of California man killed in trash sweep

James Edward Oakley, 58-year-old man living in Vallejo, was crushed by piece of excavating equipment last year.

New details have emerged in the death of a northern  man who was killed by a piece of excavating equipment during a city sweep of what officials have referred to as an illegal dumping site.

James Edward Oakley, a 58-year-old man who lived on the streets of Vallejo, was found dead at the site in the city last Christmas eve.

Two months later,  that Oakley had been crushed to death and said that after investigating the matter, police found that the killing was accidental. The district attorney’s office said there was insufficient evidence to file criminal charges. But the city did not offer details about what led up to Oakley’s death and why crews didn’t tell him to leave the site before they began clearing it.

Now, KQED, the Bay Area’s NPR affiliate, has obtained the , put together by a sheriff’s deputy, which includes new information about what unfolded and how the crew could have missed Oakley.

According to Jessica Dew, the sheriff’s deputy who was dispatched to the scene, the public works crew working on the sweep of the area saw a mattress covered with a tarp as well as tote bags and a shopping cart with bags of trash, KQED reported. The crew allegedly kicked at the mattress and called out to see whether anyone was there, but didn’t hear a response. They removed some items but left the tarp that had been on the mattress, according to the report. Another worker used the front bucket of the backhoe to compress the mattress and scooped it, along with Oakley, up.

When the worker began moving the mattress away, another worker saw a leg. Earlier in the day before the sweep, waste management workers said they had decided not to collect trash in the area after seeing a man at the site, KQED reported. Oakley was reportedly living there at the time.

Dew’s account comes amid calls for greater accountability and transparency from Vallejo officials, whom local organizers and members of the Vallejo and the wider Bay Area unhoused community say are trying to skirt past Oakley’s death without offering a full account of what occurred or proposals for how to avoid such killings in the future.

“He died because he was homeless, how do you miss that? There’s no amount of trash that’s going to justify them running over somebody with a backhoe … It’s like we don’t matter, but we do,” Kathleen McNeil, a founding member of Vallejo Homeless Union,  with Kron 4 News.
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