by Natalie Hanson & Leslie Layton
posted Feb. 21
Tom Covington curled up to sleep in a downtown Chico doorway on a January night near another unsheltered man. Both men were awakened around 2 a.m. by a flaming bag that was tossed on them and that burned Covington’s sleeping bag, hand and his right side.
Covington was able to slap the fire out, but the men were disgusted and angry to find that the bag was full of feces. Covington’s wheelchair had been taken by one of the two men who had been lurking around them when they bedded down.
Covington, a congenial man who was recently interviewed on Second Street as he sat on two slabs of cardboard on a cold sidewalk, was treated and released at the emergency room the morning of the attack. He still has four or five small skin wounds healing from the burns.