Christopher Chavez said that while his daughter often came by his home, his daughter was homeless and often slept outside during the daytime.
A spokesperson for the Modesto Police Department said that on Saturday around noon, a landscaper was cutting the grass at Beard Brook Park on a tractor with a pull behind mower when he saw a body in the grass that he had already passed through.
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When I was a kid living in Modesto while my father was overseas, going to Beard Brook park was a real treat. It's located where Dry Creek flows into the Tuolumne, and back then they had a Korean War era fighter embedded in concrete and an old locomotive that kids could crawl all over, fall off of and suffer their first broken arm or a leg. There were playgrounds, wading pools, ball fields and a Sno-cone guy that made a killing on hot summer days.
Nowadays, though? They moved the locomotive to the Amtrak Station off of Claus Rd and I have no clue what they did with the jet. The park's full of junkies, hookers, and some gang kids, with homeless camps all up and down the river and creek banks from one end to the other. No fucking way would I go down there now, much less take a kid.
