Killing of Homeless Man Shocks Friends : Shooting: Police had no reason to fire at unarmed drug addict, they say. He is described as quiet and kind.

SANTA ANA — Friends and social workers reacted with shock and disbelief Tuesday to the fatal shooting of a homeless man by Santa Ana police as he sat hidden in a row of bushes next to a doughnut shop in broad daylight.

“He was real quiet. He never bothered nobody, never argued with anyone. He always minded his own business.” That is how one of the dead man’s friends, who calls himself “Chuck E. Cheese,” described Roberto Duarte, 58, who was shot to death Monday afternoon.

Richard Roden, director of the Salvation Army Hospitality House, which Duarte occasionally visited, remembered him as a kind man who was well-loved by homeless people. “He had love in his heart,” Roden said. “He was always polite and followed the rules. He always wanted to help his peers.”

Duarte--who had been homeless for 15 years and was known on the streets as “Papa,” “Valise,” or “Bliss”--was shot about 3:15 p.m. by an officer on bicycle patrol as he sat in the bushes next to the Donut Star at 404 N. Grand Ave.

Police said the shooting occurred after two officers saw two male adults engaged in what they believed to be criminal activity.

The case has been turned over to the Orange County district attorney’s office for investigation, a standard procedure in officer-involved shootings.

On Tuesday police and district attorney spokesmen would not comment on the case, except to say that the officers--whose names they would not divulge--are not rookies and have not been reassigned during the investigation.

Duarte’s friends say that he was addicted to heroin and cocaine. Witnesses, however, said that the diminutive man, who stood 5 foot 6 inches tall and weighed slightly more than 100 pounds, was not armed at the time of the incident and did nothing to provoke the attack. “It was cold-blooded murder,” was how one witness to the shooting described what he saw.

On the day after the shooting, a lawyer who has represented several homeless people in lawsuits against the city of Santa Ana attributed Duarte’s death to a pattern of violent abuse perpetrated against homeless people by the city and Police Department over the last several years.

“The city has treated homelessness as a criminal rather than a human problem,” said Christopher Mears, an attorney who works out of Irvine. “The fundamental problem is a callous disregard for the rights of homeless people. This will produce a single result: repeated incidents of excessive force.”

In fact, a number of lawsuits have been filed on behalf of homeless people alleging various abuses since 1988. A 1989 sweep during which city maintenance workers confiscated and discarded property of the homeless in the Civic Center eventually resulted in a $50,000 settlement with 15 of them. In a separate but similar incident, a homeless man was recently awarded $9,300 in compensation by a Superior Court jury which decided that his rights had been violated.

And two years ago a judge dismissed all charges against 70 homeless people who had been arrested on charges ranging from jaywalking to pulling leaves off a tree. After being taken into custody, they were shackled in an athletic stadium for several hours, then driven in vans to the city’s southernmost border and told to get out of town. A civil case stemming from that incident resulted in 31 homeless people receiving a $400,000 lawsuit settlement from the city.

David N. Ream, Santa Ana’s city manager, denied Tuesday that the city has a pattern of abusing its homeless population.

And some who deal with that population every day say that the Santa Ana Police Department has shown remarkable restraint in its dealings with homeless people since the lawsuits were filed.

“The police officers are always very nice when they come into our courtyard,” said Pam Cole, program manager of the Episcopal Service Alliance, which feeds dozens of homeless people daily at its downtown facility. “They’ve always been terrific; I’m very surprised that this happened.”

Said Larry Haynes, executive director of Mercy House, a transitional living center for homeless single men: “If anything, a lot of homeless guys I know wish that the police would crack down a little more. There sort of seems to be a hands-off attitude now, especially in the Civic Center.”

Attorney Mears disagrees. Shootings such as this one, he believes, result from an attitude he sees as pervasive among city and police officials, especially in Santa Ana.

“The fact that he was homeless and diminutive and a drug abuser who was not in good shape indicates to me a mismatch of enormous proportion,” the lawyer said. “What this kind of abuse arises out of is the same phenomenon that the Rodney King abuse arose out of--the perception by police officers that there are members of society who are somehow less than human.”