Councilman Urges Probe of Sweeper Fatality : Accident: Woo calls for a review of the city’s use of heavy equipment to clean Skid Row after a transient is struck and killed.

Responding to last week’s death of a homeless man who was run over by a city street maintenance vehicle in the downtown area, City Councilman Michael Woo on Tuesday called for an investigation of the incident and a review of the city’s use of heavy equipment to clean out Skid Row.

The action represents a small victory for the homeless and their advocates, who assert that the city’s method of street cleaning rousts and intimidates those who live on the street.

Woo introduced a motion calling for the review at Tuesday’s City Council meeting. It was referred without discussion to the council’s Public Works Committee.

The Department of Public Works already has started an investigation into the death, said Steve Harrington, president of the Board of Public Works.

“Anytime someone is injured or killed during city work, there is a very detailed report on the cause,” he said.

Under the city’s Skid Row street-sweeping program, skip loaders are led by Los Angeles police patrol cars into areas where homeless people have been known to gather and where garbage collects.

Officers escorting the loaders are supposed to notify transients that heavy machinery is coming through, Department of Public Works officials said.

Michael Steriotti, a 39-year-old transient, was crushed to death Sept. 24 by a city-operated skip loader while he napped in a garment district alley, police said. Authorities said a patrolman who preceded the loader into the alley did not see Steriotti.

Police reports indicate that Steriotti was lying uncovered and away from the trash lining one side of the alley when the loader inadvertently rolled over him.

“There is certainly much more machinery being brought in than is needed to clean each site,” said Alice Callaghan, director of Las Familias Del Pueblo, a community center on Skid Row. “There was a certain predictability to (Steriotti’s death). If we don’t look at the process that brought it about, something like it will happen again.

“The city workers just can’t rumble down alleyways--thinking that they are John Wayne with these huge pieces of machinery--and expect that no one is going to get hurt.”

Harrington said the city has had little choice but to use heavy machinery in its two-year-old street-sweeping program on Skid Row.

“We pick up and bring out tons of trash each day,” he said. “There’s no way that this could be done by hand, by trying to scoop it all into trash containers. In the areas where homeless gather, there’s just too much of it.”

Callaghan said the complaints about the sweeps are not that they take place, but that they are conducted in an “intimidating and dangerous way.”

“Before the accident, our concern was that the sweeps robbed people of their self-esteem,” she said. “Now (they have) actually robbed someone of his life.”