He was “ebullient,” “effervescent,” maybe a bit “childish,” friends said. The seizures that he had were the penalty of a past life he was trying to renounce. His new path brought him into a circle of friends from the congregants of his church to the community volunteers who spent years trying to bring him indoors. Those friends gathered Sunday in a sliver of a park on Los Feliz Boulevard to recall the life of Jeffrey Pereira, 54, who died Friday in his encampment nearby on the banks of the L.A. River. Pereira was one of the more than 1,200 people who died on the streets of Los Angeles in 2020. Unlike so many, he was neither unknown nor alone.