In a tragic turn of events, a 46-year-old California mother of six and Army veteran, Lucrecia Macias Barajas, was one of two bodies found in a homeless encampment. Days before being found, Barajas had gone missing
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According to a Los Angeles Police Department email shared with PEOPLE, Barajas’s body was found at Huntley Drive in the Westlake district, Los Angeles, on May 12. As reported by NBC4, the mother was found alongside another man’s body inside a tent that was locked from the inside.
Reportedly, it was Barajas’s daughter who ripped open the tent, finding both her mother’s and the man’s bodies being eaten by dogs, as per police. According to the outlet, the daughter had been looking for Lucrecia Macias Barajas after she went missing for days. KTLA states that Barajas’s family managed to locate her after tracing her phone.
The medical examiner’s officer only stated that the other body belonged to a 30-year-old male. He is yet to be publicly identified, waiting for his next of kin to be notified of his passing. As per KTLA, the cause of death for him and Barajas remains under investigation.
Neighbors And Family React
Residents reacted to the heartbreaking and shocking death of Barajas. In particular, Harrison Redd, a neighbor, told NBC4 that he felt for Barajas’s daughter’s pain.
“I definitely feel for the daughter because I saw her very emotional throughout the whole ordeal,” Redd said.
Francis Jacobs-Bailey also spoke with the outlet, saying that he wishes that the city could do more for the homeless.
“We were very tired with the situation with the homeless here. This is a very nice neighborhood,” Bailey said. “They sell drugs around here. It’s new. I live here for seven years. This never happened before. Never, never, never, never. So I hope somebody does something. The city has to know about this problem.”
Amely Becerra, Barajas’s daughter —not the one who found her dead— told KTLA that her mother was not a “homeless drug addict.”
“Some people are coming to that conclusion and that’s not fair,” Becerra said. “She was just at the wrong place at the wrong time.”
A GoFundMe was set up to help Barajas’s family raise funds to bury the mother of six alongside her father in Nicaragua. In the fundraiser, they called her death a “moment of shock, sadness, and need.”
“Those of you who knew Lucre know very well that she would give the food out of her mouth to make sure you had a bite to eat,” the fundraiser read. “She loved wholeheartedly and was selfless, caring, loving. She left us all too soon, and it is a shame to lose such a wonderful human being.”