Mississippi man arrested for camping inside closed school
Staff report
GAINESVILLE, Fla. – Devon M. Hicks, 22, of Olive Branch, Mississippi, was arrested yesterday for camping in a portable classroom at Stephen Foster Elementary, which is no longer being used as a school but is still owned by Alachua County Public Schools.
At about 11:25 p.m. on September 18, a Gainesville Police Department officer made contact with Hicks inside a portable classroom on school property. The officer reported that Hicks jumped the fence using a school chair and was using the portable classroom as shelter.
Hicks has been charged with trespassing on school property. He has no local criminal history, and Judge Luis Bustamante ordered him released on his own recognizance.
Articles about arrests are based on reports from law enforcement agencies. The charges listed are taken from the arrest report and/or court records and are only accusations. All suspects are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.
Open up the unused schools for the homeless and show your compassion County Commissioners. These Democrat County Commissioners have created all this homelessness and Corruption in services to them.
Open up your own home to them if it’s so important to you. I’m tired of paying for more felons to move into out city.
Another homeless person from another state.
There’s more people getting off the buses at Walmart than there are getting on. Put their arses back on the Greyhounds and send them back.
For those liberals who don’t like it, they should have to adopt one until they can provide for themselves. It ain’t my job and it ain’t the government’s job—life ain’t free.
The building needs to be torn down or the bums will use it. Still francis house had to be boarded up.
Perhaps the Man has an Odea our community leaders should look into of turning Abandoned Schools and Public Buildings into housing for Homeless? This problem wont solve itself, it does not say he damaged anything, only that he was tired, Cold and needed a place to sleep and saw an abandoned Building that seemed Perfect for it.
Homeless are going to just disappear, and just because you are homeless does not make you a bad person. We need to find solutions before issue of homelessness grows any larger
Monte: with kindness, I appreciate your sentiment. It reveals a kind and compassionate heart. The trouble is, no amount of your and my tax dollars solves this problem.
It’s the nation’s and the county’s biggest grift. Humor me, add up all the money that’s been spent in pursuit of “solving the homelessness crisis” in just our county. I predict you will discover we could have purchased a 10-acre parcel and a 5,000 sq. ft. home for every homeless individual in the county as well as provided for their electricity, health insurance, and an in-ground pool with weekly pool service.
Instead, that money went to a non-profit executive class who now have 5,000 square foot homes with in-ground pools — and we are no closer to solving or even improving the “homelessness crisis” in our communities.
So let me say the part nobody says out loud. The solution is not more money. It is also not just “tough love” and involuntary treatment, because that alone is a revolving door — you sober a man up for ninety days, hand him a bus ticket, and drop him back on the same corner with the same dealer and the same untreated psychosis. He’s back inside a month. That’s not a solution, that’s a carousel with paperwork.
Here is what actually solves it. All of it. Together. Nothing optional:
One. Involuntary commitment for the severely addicted and the severely mentally ill. No more “harm reduction” as a synonym for “let them die outdoors.” You cannot consent your way out of a psychotic break, and you cannot negotiate with fentanyl.
Two. Housing attached to the exit. Commitment only works if the door on the way out opens into a bed, not a sidewalk. This is the expensive part, and it’s the part the grifters skip because there’s no ribbon-cutting and no grant renewal in a studio apartment.
Three. Long-term custodial care for the people who will never recover — the ones who’ve been on the street for twenty years and are not coming back. Stop pretending they’re “clients.” They need a supervised place to live and die with dignity, permanently, and the state needs to build it without apology.
Four. Cut off the supply. The fentanyl is the engine. Everything else is rearranging deck chairs until the poison stops flowing. That means hard borders, hard sentencing, and treating the cartels as what they are.
Five. Defund the middlemen. Cap nonprofit administrative overhead. Publish cost-per-housed for every agency in the county. Kill the overlapping grants. If an organization can’t show a body in a bed for the money it takes, it closes. Let the executive class find honest work.
Six. Accept the equilibrium. Some cities will stay lenient. Some will get strict. People will migrate toward whoever coddles them. A patchwork is the realistic outcome, and pretending otherwise is how you end up with a federal program that becomes a bigger grift than the local ones.
That is the whole prescription. Every piece of it is known to work. None of it is a mystery.
And here is the part that makes me cynical instead of hopeful: nobody will do it.
The left won’t do one, two, or three because it sounds like “institutionalization” and they’d rather fund a mural. The right won’t do two or three because it costs real money and their donors want a tax cut.
The nonprofits won’t do five because it’s suicide. The politicians won’t do four because it’s hard and the donors are everywhere. And the taxpayers — you and me — won’t do any of it, because we don’t want the halfway house next to our kids’ school and we don’t want to pay for the man who spat on us downtown.
So we’ll keep doing what we do. We’ll fund another round of grants, attend another gala, cut another ribbon on another “navigation center,” and count the tents again next spring. It’s bad for business. College tuition for their children won’t pay for itself without homeless vagrants to attract taxpayer money. Cynical. But accurate.
The medicine exists. The patient just refuses to take it — and the patient is all of us.
I say it’s time to stop people from Mississippi coming into Florida!
Rather, we should get some Mississippians to run for our school board:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/11/us/mississippi-schools-transformation.html
Jazzman, you’re an idiot
Amazing how these out-of-state homeless get the idea to come to Gainesville. Almost like they are being recruited by the local homeless-services mafia.