In the early morning of Feb. 8, a homeless man with paraplegia was found crawling on a Los Angeles skid row sidewalk after allegedly being dumped by a van traced to Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center. Gabino Olvera, clothed only in a soiled hospital gown, and with a broken colostomy bag, clutched a bag of belongings in his teeth as he crawled away."According to witnesses, he had just enough time to pull his legs out of the street before the van rushed away," says Detective Russ Long of the Los Angeles Police Department. "Some homeless people rushed to his aide, took down the license plate and a couple bike officers happened upon the scene."Earlier, at 1 a.m., two ambulance attendants had attempted to drop Olvera off at Midnight Mission, but took him back to the hospital after talking to Mission staff.

"They wheeled him in, strapped to a gurney, he doesn't have use of his legs and the attendants didn't have a wheelchair or a walker for him. They didn't have any discharge papers, either. We were really curious as to what the after-care situation was going to be," says Orlando Ward, director of public affairs for the mission. "Releasing any patient and wheeling them in on a gurney at 1:00 in the morning doesn't make a lot of sense to me."

Ward says his mission would not have refused Olvera had he "crawled up here on his own," but couldn't accept him from the attendants. He adds that many homeless people have been left outside the mission from hospitals. The Los Angeles City Attorney's office recently filed an indictment against Kaiser Permanente hospital for another "homeless dumping."