D.C.’s ‘Skid Row-type thing’: Homeless encampments grow amid pandemic
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Sitting shirtless in a homeless encampment at 12th Street and Massachusetts Avenue NW, Keith Barnes, 38, prepared to shoot fentanyl.
“I am one of the most vicious drug addicts I know,” he said.
Though he doesn’t live here — his tent is pitched just south of Dupont Circle across from a patio bar — he is a frequent visitor to the encampment, which is yards from an elementary school, a float spa and a shuttered Bolt Burger. A friend injects the fentanyl into Barnes’s neck above a chest tattoo that quotes a Billy Joel lyric: “I’d rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints.”
Such scenes are becoming frequent around the District as the city is becoming more divided about what to do with the homeless encampments.
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