The body lay unsecured for more than 10 hours while burglars twice picked through the dead man’s room.
So goes the the story circulating among veterans living on the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs campus in West Los Angeles.
Residents say their reports of the theft — like their complaints of other crimes — go unheeded because their 2-year-old apartment building lies in a law enforcement no man’s land where no police agency has the power or resources to investigate and prosecute run-of-the-mill crime.
The unincorporated island is surrounded by the city of Los Angeles but outside the jurisdiction of the Los Angeles Police Department. Technically, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department polices its 388 acres, but the distant West Hollywood Station rarely responds to calls, if ever. The VA Police Department, which is mostly tasked with providing security at the hospital, is prohibited by an obscure federal rule from being “deputized” to enforce state law.
The need for policing is becoming more acute as residences for hundreds of disabled veterans have been built in recent years and the campus population grows from the hundreds to potentially thousands under President Trump’s 2025 executive order to create a National Center for Warrior Independence with housing for 6,000 veterans.
In the absence of an official investigation, the incident last September has been magnified, and perhaps embellished, in the minds of veterans living on the campus, a community defined by the vulnerability of physical disability, substance use and trauma.
“Every time we turn around we’re doing an incident report,” said Tammy Chelossi, a resident service coordinator for the company that manages the building that opened in 2024.
“We call the VAPD all the time,” Chelossi said. “They don’t do anything. They come out [but say], ‘Our hands are tied.’”
In public forums and interviews, veterans living on the campus have spoken of a culture of impunity. Among their complaints: non-residents coming and going to buy and sell drugs, prostitution, crime brought on campus from outside and unruly behavior by residents.
In May, a man pushed a wounded and visibly bleeding woman in a wheelchair out of the entrance of a building. In one version circulating, attributed to a source in the VA police, she had already been stabbed by the time she arrived at the VA. Chelossi said she was disappointed the police didn’t consider the man who pushed her out a suspect.
“They shook his hand and said, ‘Good job taking her outside to the ambulance,’” she said.
The VA Police did not respond to a call requesting reports of the two incidents.
Residents who spoke to The Times on condition of anonymity and veteran advocates say the lack of information on reported crimes and follow-up investigations feeds their anxiety about safety.
Although federal law requires the VA to publish statistics on arrests, citations, investigations and prosecutions by local agencies, the campus police website has no link to crime data. The VA responded to a Freedom of Information Act request from a campus advocate for data with a demand for $20,004.36 in programming costs to retrieve the data.
The Times filed a Freedom of Information Act request on June 2 for VA Police records of the hallway death and the stabbing. The VA acknowledged the request but has not turned over any materials.
For the decades after the historic Old Soldiers’ Home was shut down in the 1970s, the two-thirds of the campus north of Wilshire Boulevard remained a collection of vacant deteriorating buildings and residential programs for physical and mental health recovery. VA Police focused on the third of the campus south of Wilshire Boulevard where the VA Medical Center rose.
VA Police enforcement was long concentrated on the southern third of the campus south of Wilshire Boulevard, where the VA Medical Center stands. For decades, the north campus had no resident population, remaining a collection of vacant deteriorating buildings and residential programs for physical and mental health recovery. That changed in recent years as legal actions forced the agency to begin repopulating the north campus.
A 2011 lawsuit filed by disabled veterans began a slow but now accelerating movement by the VA to restore the north campus as a veteran community. First came a federal court settlement requiring 1,200 units to be built (about half are now completed), then a second lawsuit resulted in an order to add 2,500 more, a ruling now under appeal. Last May, President Trump issued an order to build housing for 6,000.
The jurisdictional conundrum grew only worse as the VA issued 99-year leases to local developers to build those initial 1,200 units.
“As the VA leases the buildings to an entity, that’s no longer considered federal property,” said Jim Zenner, director of the Los Angeles County Department of Military and Veterans Affairs. “So they’re not able to enforce laws in those buildings.”
Zenner said the VAPD told him they were unable even to secure the dead body last September because they didn’t have jurisdiction.
“And so they had to literally wait for the Sheriff’s Department to get here and the Medical Examiner to get here,” Zenner said. “They didn’t get here for 10 or 11 hours.”
He’s not sure their interpretation of the law is right.
“I get mixed messages like, ‘We can and we can’t because of the jurisdictional thing,’” he said. “‘Maybe we can, maybe we can’t’ is not allowing the VAPD to do what they need to do.”
The future north campus remains a contest of differing visions. The housing now existing and being built is subsidized for the homeless and disabled. Some veteran groups are pushing for more diversity with housing for students, VA staff and veterans working off campus. Trump’s order calls for veterans from around the country to come for rehabilitative services.
Whatever ultimately develops, there is little disagreement that future campus security will depend on expanded law enforcement and clearer lines of authority.
During a congressional hearing in May on Trump’s order, VA officials acknowledged a public safety problem and said they are taking steps to manage it.
“We want to make sure that veterans are living in a safe, drug free environment where they can thrive, and, as you all are aware, that’s not happening,” senior counselor to the secretary Danielle Ranyan testified. “We’re taking care of that. But this didn’t just happen overnight, and it didn’t happen on President Trump’s watch.”
Under Secretary for Health John J. Bartrum testified that the VA police had been beefed up from the 50s and 60s last year to over 80 and will eventually reach 160 — a staff responsible not only for the campus, but for other facilities in the VA’s five-county Greater Los Angeles catchment area.
“Security is job one,” Bartrum said. “The veterans have to feel secure on the campus.”
As a stopgap, the VA brought on a private security firm in June to provide uniformed 24-hour “observe and report” sentry posts and roving patrols.
“I’m happy to see they’re at least doing something,” said Rob Reynolds, an Iraq war veteran who assists veterans to obtain services and housing. “I would say it makes it feel safer.”
But Reynolds and others, see security as a systemic problem.
Retired VA police chief Dave Weiner, who now owns a training business, was skeptical that the VAPD could sustain the necessary strength without increasing its pay scale.
New recruits must work years to equal starting pay at nearby departments, and retirement benefits only kick in after 30 years, compared to 20 years elsewhere, Weiner said.
“The pay has never been on par,” he said. “It makes it very difficult for officers to live in the LA area. They have to live in Riverside or San Bernardino.”
(On Thursday, the VA announced a package of national reforms of the VA police force including an increase of entry-level pay. Weiner said the modest increase “would not do much to change the competitive picture here in LA.”)
Weiner thinks one administrative change that could make VAPD more effective would be to revise the clause in VA Directive 0730 that prohibits the agency from being deputized or appointed as special officers “for the purpose of enforcing state laws and local ordinances on VA property.”
That could clear up confusion of whether VAPD can respond to and investigate reported crime on the leased properties.
It would also clear officers to make mental health holds under California’s Welfare and Institutions Code, both on the campus and across the region. VA police often respond to veterans in crisis seeking to get them into care but have no power, Weiner said.
“That is a tool for officers to utilize to get people into a system of care,” Weiner said. Currently, “either we have to leave people in crisis or we have to incarcerate them. That’s not a good situation.”
Zenner, the county military affairs department head, testified at the May hearing that the VA needs both state policing powers and a federal veteran treatment court on campus to support veterans who run afoul of the law.
Four Los Angeles Superior Court judges in courtrooms from Compton to Van Nuys hear cases of veterans charged with state crimes. They function like mental health diversion courts, suspending adjudication of qualifying crimes while veterans receive treatment, often at the VA. But the nearest federal treatment court that could handle cases under the VA’s jurisdiction is in San Diego. Few Los Angeles cases are routed there, Zenner said.
“Justice-involved veterans near the campus grapple with PTSD, traumatic brain injury, substance use disorders, and other invisible wounds stemming from their military service,” Zenner said. “Instead of repeated incarceration, participants would be mandated into integrated mental health services, substance abuse programs, and veteran mentorship.”
Anthony Allman, executive director of the nonprofit Vets Advocacy set up to monitor the earlier settlement, proposes that the VA contract with the Sheriff’s Department, as numerous small cities do, to provide routine patrol on campus.
The opportunity is ripe, Allman believes, because the Sheriff’s Department is losing its contract with Metro and it will have extra capacity.
The VA says it’s already tested that course and came up empty-handed.
During the congressional hearing, Ranyan testified that the agency’s assistant secretary for security met with the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department earlier in the year to pursue a contract for 24-hour patrol.
“We were told that they’re down 2,000 police officers and that their morale is low and that they’re not even [able] to meet their own needs,” Ranyan said.
In response to questions from The Times, the Sheriff’s Department characterized Ranyan’s comment as inaccurate but acknowledged ongoing discussions with the VA on a new “memorandum of understanding.”
Under an existing MOU, “Sheriff’s personnel respond to critical or emergent incidents when requested and when our resources or capabilities would be better equipped to address dynamic situations,” it said, the statement said.
Sheriff’s Department records reviewed by The Times show that the agency reported one crimes on the VA property in 2025 and one this year, both on the southern campus.
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