The night her tent was set on fire, Robin Monks couldn’t understand at first what was happening.
She was huddled with her boyfriend and two friends in a large encampment between Exmouth and Waterloo streets, where she and about a dozen other people have been living since the beginning of the summer amid a mess of overflowing dumpsters, refuse, propane tanks, and discarded furniture.
They were trying to keep warm in conditions that felt like -11 C with the windchill.
At about 7:40 p.m., “we heard a car pull up,” she said. “And then there was stuff hitting the top of our tent, and they
