Cold Water

The owner of Dizzy Dean’s Donuts recently threw water toward a sleeping unhoused woman and then blamed her for it in a video circulating on social media. The woman says in the video that her clothing became wet and that she had nothing else to wear. 

The incident, which took place Oct. 23, went viral on the popular PublicFreakout page on Reddit and then the Eugene local subreddit after being posted Nov. 5, and drew widespread condemnation. Eugene Weekly spoke to the shop owner, Dean Weaver, about the incident, as well as to some local advocates for the unhoused who have been giving free doughnuts to homeless people in the wake of the incident.

The video, from a first-person perspective, shows Weaver walking toward an unhoused woman resting against a trailer parked near the doughnut shop on West 11th Avenue in Eugene sometime after dark. Once near the woman, the camera pans away and water is heard splashing on the ground. The startled woman responds angrily with expletives, and Weaver says, “You aren’t putting fires around here.” 

As Weaver walks away the woman says, “You just dumped water all over me, I don’t even have any clothes to change into,” to which Weaver responds, “It’s all your fault.” When he steps back into the doughnut shop, chuckling can be heard in the background. 

Weaver says there was a small fire behind the woman, which can’t be seen in the video, that he was dousing, and that he didn’t intend to pour the water on the sleeping woman. He was focused on stopping the fire, he says.

But the woman says in the video that Weaver dumped water on her clothes. On the night of Oct. 23, when Weaver says the incident occurred, the high was 45 degrees. Wet ground, evidence of rain, can be seen in the video.

Read more on Eugene Weekly’s website here.