Most of the men chatting to my colleague Nick Toscano under a concrete overpass one hot January day in 2014 were talking rubbish. He'd been sent to cover the homeless camp that had taken over Enterprize Park. We didn't know then what kind of story it would become.

Then the camp leader, "Mouse", arrived.  He was short and thin, with dark hair and squinty eyes and yelled at Nick for sitting on his bed. But then they started talking. Soon he relaxed. And Mouse took him for a walk by the river.

"I'm straight up. I'm direct. There are no lies about me," he said in a voice that sounded decades older than his 42 years.

"The federal government don't give a shit about us street people."

Nick went back to the office and wrote a story featuring Mouse (real name Morgan Wayne Perry), who recounted how he was first homeless at 14.

But on the day before the article was scheduled to go to print, the interview took on an ominous new meaning. Mouse had been killed.

'It's long and it's cold," Mouse had said of being homeless. "And you have to sleep with one eye open because you don't know who's going to bash you or stab you or rob you".

Easton Woodhead was found not guilty of murder due to mental impairment. Photo: Wayne Taylor

Mouse was stabbed the morning of Sunday January 5, 2014. This year former Melbourne Grammar School student Easton Woodhead was sent to a maximum security psychiatric hospital for up to 25 years over the death, after being found not guilty of murder due to mental impairment.

On the day after he died, a photograph of Mouse at his Melbourne camp ran on the front page of The Age, alongside that prophetic quote.

Wayne Perry's son Brad Anderson visits the place where his father was fatally stabbed. Photo: Angela Wylie

In the following days and weeks I was to discover much more about the former drug dealer. He died without knowing he had become a grandfather. He was a father of four children. He had spent time living in a house, with a partner. He was loved. His family had been searching for him.

His sister Michele Perry would later tell me that Mouse was so damaged she doubted anything could have been done to get him off the streets.

As a young boy, he was tortured by his stepfather - including being locked up at night in a doghouse and forced to wear girls' clothes and bright red lipstick.

Trauma cripples many of those on the streets. But all the public sees when they walk past a slumped beggar in the city is a sad face.

The story of Mouse's death stirred up unprecedented goodwill from Melburnians, who in February 2014 gathered in their hundreds at Enterprize Park to demand a better deal for the street homeless. Or, as Mouse had argued, more funding for homes.

Yet even that day I questioned if enough was being achieved.

Tributes to 'Mouse' in Enterprise Park. Photo: James Boddington

I was horrified to discover that one of Mouse's daughters, who had travelled from Townsville to attend the event, was actually sleeping on the streets near the concrete pylon where her father's blood had been spilled. Jaylee told me she had run out of money, but it was also a pilgrimage of sorts, to walk in her father's shoes.

Today, the number of people sleeping rough in central Melbourne is at an all-time high and Enterprize Park has become the largest rough sleeping camp in Victoria.

I have been told jockey-sized Mouse used to stand on one of the raised pylons there (now home to his memorial), and give passing school children lectures about what it was like to be homeless.

Although I never knew him, I think if he was still alive, he'd still be telling us that we need to do much better.

"What I tell you, you can put everything in the newspaper," Mouse had told Nick.

"I want to talk to you about the street people and how they get a raw deal."

Mouse's story features on Australian Story this week.