Community activists arrived in droves to a small house on W. 60th St in South Los Angeles late on Wednesday afternoon, with the intent of blocking the eviction of 79 year-old retired teacher Faith Parker.

“We’re here for unity and justice for everyone,” said Kwazi Nkrumah, from Occupy the Hood, during the rally held in front of the Parker home.

With a great deal of effort, Faith and her husband bought the small South LA home in 1962. When he died in 1976, Faith worked even harder to keep the home where she raised her three children on her own.

Faith and Saundra Parker.

According to daughter Saundra Parker, in 2006, at the height of the real estate bubble, the house worth about $350,000. “My mother refinanced and took out a $150,000 loan to pay for some family medical and legal bills without telling me. When I saw the bill the first time I saw it was an adjustable loan. I called Countrywide right away to change it, but they said it couldn’t be done. So we just stuck with it.”

When the adjustable mortgage became too heavy a load in 2008, the Parkers applied for a loan modification with Countrywide. A year later, they received a notice from Bank of America informing them they were the new mortgage holders.They offered a loan modification. Saundra says a bank representative told her they couldn’t proceed, because the loan was not in arrears. “They told me to stop making the payments, so we would go in arrears and then qualify for the loan modification,” she claims.

Greg Akili, running for new 59th Assembly seat, joins demonstrators protesting against the foreclosure.

The Parkers stopped making payments in 2009 and filed the paperwork for the loan modification. In May of 2011 they were denied the modification and the house went into foreclosure.

“Bank of America promised to work with my mother, but they lied,” says Saundra. “It’s called greed and elder abuse.”

Faith, who has lived in the same house for the past 50 years, was overwhelmed with emotion at the outpouring of support.

“Thank you, thank you,” she repeated, as she shook hands and hugged people who came to protest her imminent eviction. “What they’re doing is wrong. We have to let everyone know what they’re doing,” she told one supporter.

“We’re here to occupy this house! The moment the eviction notice is put up, we’re going to come here and camp out to protect this family,” exclaimed foreclosure advocate Carlos Marroquín during the demonstration. Marroquín, a spokesman for Occupy LA, helped organize the protest.

Carlos Marroquin, foreclosure advocate, helped organize the rally.

“I know what it’s like to be a victim of foreclosure. My house was illegally foreclosed. It destroyed my marriage and my family. So I take this very personally. When I learned they were going after a 79 year-old woman, I had to get involved,” he says.

Among those who came to support the Parkers was community organizer Greg Akili, who is running for the 59th Assembly District. “I came here today because people like the Parkers who need help, they need someone to stand up for them.”

“We demand a moratorium on all foreclosures,” said attorney Susan Daya Hamwi during the many speeches at the rally. “The banks should be held accountable because they’ve committed fraud.”

Several Occupy LA organizers pointed out that demanding an end to foreclosures was going to be a priority for the movement in 2012.

“The Occupy movement has reignited popular struggle looking for economic democracy,” affirmed Kwazi Nkrumah. “If Martin Luther King were here today, he’d be part of this movement.”

View from La Brea, between Slauson and Stocker, looking West. (Photo by David Roy.)

Wide open spaces are hard to come by in Los Angeles. The crowds and traffic that permeate the city make the expanse of the more than 300-acre Kenneth Hahn State Recreation Area in Baldwin Hills that much more of an anomaly. The green space, complete with walking trails, wildlife, and scenic views, sits right next to another L.A. landmark: the Inglewood Oil Field.

The oil field is more than three times bigger than the park–the 1,000-acre spread is the largest urban oil field in the country. A recent increase in activity on the oil field has some residents concerned about the health and safety risks that could come with adding more wells.

“People are running and exercising right next to active drilling without even realizing it,” says Ronda Brown. She thinks there needs to be better signage within the recreation area warning people of the proximity of the oil field. “I’m not saying people shouldn’t be allowed to go there, but they do have a right to be better informed.”

From 1980-2004 an average of 10 new wells a year were added to the field. In 2004, Texas-based oil company Plains Exploration & Production Co. (PXP) discovered more oil reserves in the field. PXP reinvigorated a drilling program on the land that many previously thought had already yielded most of its resources.

What really concerns Brown is that PXP now plans to drill 600 new wells in the next 20 years. The company has drilled 32 new wells since the beginning of 2011.

Brown vividly remembers that in 2006 drilling operations were ramped up and the release of harmful fumes forced nearby residents to evacuate their homes. The county forced PXP to stop drilling operations for six months after the accident while it worked to develop regulations. Until then, very few had been in place.

In 2008, two years after those evacuations, several community groups filed a suit against PXP. The groups settled in July of 2011. Part of the settlement includes noise limits and additional air quality monitoring.

View from La Brea, between Slauson and Stocker, looking West. (Photo by David Roy.)

Despite the settlement, Brown still has concerns about the potential long-term health effects of living so close to a functioning oil field that had never been the subject of a comprehensive environmental impact report until 2008.

What Brown finds the most distressing is the lack of communication between PXP and the county and the approximately one million residents who live in the surrounding neighborhoods. She has attended several meetings of the Baldwin Hills Community Advisory Panel – a group that was formed, according to the county website, to “foster communication and ensure continued community input for the County and for PXP.”

When Brown again expressed her concerns at a community advisory panel meeting on October 27, 2011, she was told that exercising next to an oil field is no more dangerous than exercising in other parts of the city, because there’s always the potential to breathe pollution from cars or the airport.

When she asked about improved signage within the park, panel members didn’t know who was responsible to address the issue, who should be in charge of following up on the matter, or if anything could be done in regards to her concerns.

In a follow-up email with Lisa Paillet, the community advisory panel member who represents PXP, Paillet said that Baldwin Hills Conservancy Director, David McNeil offered to work with Brown. But to date, no one has contacted Brown.

By Gracie Zheng

Inside prison, Obie Anthony dreamed of what he was missing as he served out a life sentence for a murder he insists he did not commit. He thought of the green grass, of washing dishes, of biting into the juicy pineapple Teriyaki burger he saw on television ads for Carl’s Jr.

He also thought about how he would change his ways if he ever got out. There would be school and jobs. But first, he would get rid of the tattoos that were a permanent reminder of his old life.

Today, Anthony, 37, is living out that prison dream of freedom from his new home in Apple Valley.

His murder conviction for a 1994 killing outside a South LA brothel was overturned in September 2011 after the prosecution’s key witness, a pimp, admitted he lied to the jury.

Anthony was released from prison after serving 17 years, with the help of the Northern California Innocence Project and Loyola Law School’s Project for the Innocent.

It’s been hard for him to get back to society.

Kate Germond, director of Centurion Ministries, a non-profit organization, has been handling wrongful conviction cases for 25 years. She regards the innocent people in prison as heroes for the dignity and fortitude they show in persevering through their wrongful convictions.

Within the prison culture, most people are cynical about any claims of innocence. According to Germond, inmates who say they’re innocent are abused by guards or fellow inmates when they first make these declarations. As time goes by, they get a grudging respect from the guards and fellow inmates, but it’s hard won.

“When they get out, they suffer from post-traumatic stress disorders,” Germond said. Effects of wrongful convictions include drinking, drug issues and violent thoughts. “Their freedom is not the end of their torture,” she said.

Recently Anthony got his California identification, social security card and a bank account. He took his driver’s license test, but needs to re-take it and get two more questions right to pass it.

Anthony was raised in South Central Los Angeles by a single mother. His parents were separated when he was too young to remember. His mother was once addicted to drugs—cocaine, heroin and pills. She passed away at 42 when Anthony was 19 and before he went to prison.

His problems with the law began when he was a teenager.

Anthony was involved in gangs and got expelled several times for scuffles at high schools. “At that time I was too weak as a child to make a choice to say I can do what I want to do instead of following behind somebody,” he said.

He found himself in and out of juvenile halls for breaking and entering and car theft.

Once he got caught for breaking into a junior high school, walking out with a phone and a teddy bear. “I was out in the street, running about, being a disobedient kid to my mom, not listening to nobody, having no respect for authority,” he said. “That was crazy.”

The longest time he spent in high school was eight months at Manual Arts High School, followed by one month at Jefferson High School, — both South L.A. schools — and a couple of months at Lincoln High, in East L.A., when he was in 11th grade.

Afterwards he went to A. Friedman Occupational Center for his GED, which he later finished while he was in prison.

In 1995 the prosecution’s key witness testified against Anthony in exchange for a lighter sentence in another case. Anthony lied during the trial and testified that he didn’t know his co-defendant Reggie Cole. He regrets the lie, but says he was a scared kid who thought that saying he didn’t know his co-defendant would somehow put him in a better position.

The jury found him guilty and he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. He was 19.

The hardest time for Anthony came two years into his prison sentence. “I was really alone at that point. I didn’t have much contact with anybody,” he said.

He sent out letters to family and didn’t get responses. His phone calls were blocked by friends. The only support he had was from his grandmother in St. Louis who regularly talked to him over the phone and encouraged him never to give up and come home.

“The one thing that kept giving me hope while I was in prison was I knew I was innocent,” he said.

Anthony hated the food in prison — Eggs, potatoes, and sausage links for breakfast; and tasteless veal, chicken, burgers, hot dogs and Chili Macs.

During the last few years in prison, he never went to the chow hall thanks to his fiancée, Denise Merchant, who bought him cereal, rice, beans, chocolate, meat, lotion and all kinds of stuff.

They had known each other when they were teenagers.

“He was always riding a little scooter, and I noticed he was always staring at me,” said Merchant, who is four years older than Anthony. They reconnected when Merchant got a call from her brother saying he was in the same prison as Anthony. She asked her brother to give Anthony her number and when Anthony called her from prison, “all the feelings I had for him when I was 16 all came back,” she said.

They started dating after her first prison visit, and got engaged a year and a half ago.

In prison, Anthony learned upholstery, how to put office cubicles together, landscaping, and clerical work. Apart from the set schedules of two meals a day, inmate count time, yard time, and shower time, he spent most of his time in the law library, studying his own case.

“I didn’t know the law,” he said. “I tried to learn it. Man, it was difficult.”

Despite the difficulties, he pursued his freedom as vigorously as he could. He filed motions to different courts but all got denied.

“Even though I couldn’t get nobody else to hear me, I knew the Creator heard me. I knew that he knew I wasn’t guilty of anything. I find solace in that,” he said.

Anthony went to the Hebrew church in prison every Saturday for 15 years.

He kept trying to figure out who or how he could reach out to find some help. “You got to be strong and continue to look for something in the books you got in front you, and think one day it’s going to happen,” he said.

His efforts paid off in 2008 when he got a response to his letter to the Northern California Innocence Project.

The Northern California Innocence Project–with the help of Loyola Law School’s Project for the Innocent–took on the case and helped convince a judge that the prosecution’s key witness lied to the jury.

“The evidence that we were able to turn up showed that there is absolutely nothing that connects him to the crime,” said Paige Kaneb, one of Anthony’s attorneys and a supervising attorney at the Northern California Innocence Project.

The witness admitted he never saw clearly the gunmen at the crime scene, and he based his identification of Anthony and his co-defendant from descriptions of others at the scene, according to Kaneb.

Anthony was “denied due process of law and was denied a fair trial” in 1994, says the writ habeas corpus.

His conviction was overturned on September 30, 2011.

Seventeen years in prison changed his life. “It’s made me into a more straightforward, honest and truthful person,” he said.

He now tries not to leave things unsaid in a conversation.

“Before I wasn’t that way, I would beat around the bush with certain things. I kind of was mindful about not wanting to hurt your feelings with the truth. I realize now keeping the truth from an individual hurts more than it does anything,” he said.

Anthony doesn’t harbor any anger toward what he maintains was a wrongful conviction. “Anger is weight that can hold you down and prevent you from being prosperous and progress in life,” said Anthony.

Anthony chooses to recognize the things that make him angry, acknowledge it and move forward. He no longer has to follow any set schedules of when to get up, when to eat and when to take a shower.

However, the transition from prison life to a free life has not been easy.

Anthony is trying to find a job. He doesn’t want to rush too much and get frustrated. So far he has sent out two job applications and is waiting for a reply.

Kaneb said it would be hard for Anthony to get a job as he missed out on years of growing and learning, and having a resume that includes 17 years of work.

“He is charismatic. He is really a good person. I think people will see that, but you just have to give him a chance,” said Kaneb.