Street Spirit January 2006

We Choose to Remember Them - The Nameless and Faceless Deaths in Our Midst

By Janny Castillo

The preparation committee for the St. Mary's Homeless Vigil went in search of a non-existent count. The question was how many homeless people died on the streets in Alameda County last year. They called the coroner's office, city offices, community activists, and homeless service providers. No one knew the answer, because no one in charge was counting.

On December 21st, a group of about 50 stood in a circle in St. Mary's courtyard in Oakland. The sky was cloudy and dark and people stood shivering in the cold. Rev. Ken Hamilton spoke about the dead whose names were not known; "We know we have lost brothers and sisters like us. They had names. But they died nameless. John Doe. What kind of name is that for a man?"

How many did we lose this year? How many did we lose to cold, to hunger, to violence, to sickness; hundreds in California, thousands in the country?  Homeless people seem as difficult to count after death as they are when alive. The real question is how many have to die before real help is available to our poorest and most vulnerable? The answer should be, if it has to happen, let it be ONE.

Attendees were given torn fabric to remember the dead. Rev. Hamilton said, "All the things that made that person, can now be taken up scrap by scrap and sown, re-sown into something new. To re-sew is to remember. We remember that many have been torn from us, but are now sown back together in our community for we choose to remember them...we choose to remember them."

Representatives from the Youth Emergency Assistance Hostel (YEAH!) spoke, "Two of our young people have died, one who had been on the streets since the age of 12, was recently sent home to New Jersey. He overdosed on heroin in his home. His parents were glad that he was home, but we're not happy, we lost that one. We are working so homeless youth don't have to become homeless adults."

Janny Castillo, BOSS Community Organizer read a statement from Terri Messman, Street Spirit Editor. "Shortly before Christmas last year, a poor tenant named Mary Jesus found that she had no home in this world anymore. Her landlord had raised the rent and then evicted her from the Oakland apartment she had lived in for 13 years. Being evicted felt like the end of her life to Mary Jesus. As a disabled woman living on General Assistance, she saw nothing ahead but a destitute life on the dead-end streets. So she took her own life on December 10, 2004. Mary Jesus died in despair because she owed her landlords only about $1,000. Is a human life not worth far more than $1,000?"

Michael Diehl, a community activist, well-known among the homeless community, could not say how many died on the streets. He responded instead with this e-mail: "I have tried unsuccessfully to find the name of the man who died, Sunday afternoon, November 11th. He was in his sleeping bag when the ambulance arrived. The attendee told me he was barely alive but dying from cancer. They had to leave his wheelchair which Elizabeth took care of. Prentice, the tall black man who died at the Harrison House emergency shelter seems to not have died from a drug overdose but had been complaining of feeling ill at least a week before his death. Two youths from the YEAH! youth shelter died, one in New Jersey from a drug overdose and one on December 3rd. at 4:00 pm on the streets of Berkeley."

From the memorial page at the www.createpeaceathome.org website; names and stories are posted to remember them:

• Anthony Lucero, caught fire and died under an exit ramp.

• Dalrus Joseph Brown, murdered in West Oakland,

• Frank Shorman, community activist,

• Richard Moore, a homeless Vietnam vet,

• Maria Katherine King, was brutally beaten into a coma, lived for two weeks before she died.

• and more.

How do we post the many John and Jane Does, whose names and life stories lay buried in unmarked graves? How do we remember them?

A deeper tragedy is the conditions in which these people lived. Many lived in deplorable situations in extreme poverty for decades. They endured harsh weather, long-term illness, severe mental illness and hunger. What about those who are alive and suffering today, the hundreds in our community who are living in these conditions now.

For the one who spent his last breath without shelter and died alone, the outrage and determination to rid this country of homelessness should be loud and clear. Instead, the cry for affordable housing, livable wages and affordable health care is barely a whisper. This article closes with the words that opened the vigil by Carol Johnson, St. Mary's Executive Director:

"In the year 2000 Alameda County Board of Supervisors passed a resolution declaring a state of emergency in housing for extremely low income people. Seniors and other people on SSI are too poor to qualify for what we call "affordable housing".

Since then we have tried in earnest to simply count the number of homeless deaths in this county, to attach names and faces with this crisis.  Our official efforts have been thwarted by a system reluctant to acknowledge poverty in this community, this state and this nation. Homeless people who die in this county remain uncounted, unnamed victims of neglect.

Homelessness and hunger persists and increases only because the crisis is ignored. People are dying because they are being ignored.

Insuring that there is housing for everyone and freedom from hunger is not beyond imagination or ability.  The crisis of homelessness and hunger first must be a crisis recognized not as a tourist deterrent, or a nuisance, or a sad situation, but as moral challenge for our whole community. We need to understand as Kofi Annan said "The cost of poverty is borne by all of us - north and south, rich and poor, men and women of all races and religions.  Today's real borders are not between nations, but between powerful and powerless, free and fettered, privileged and humiliated."

The intention of today's memorial service is: To make visible the war on the poor, to put names and faces on people who have died homeless, to break through our numbness and despair, to reclaim our profound awareness of the sanctity and dignity of every human life, to declare housing as a human right, and to transform our rage and grief into action that produces housing for the lowest income people."

St. Mary's Center - (510) 893-0119

Building Opportunities for Self-Sufficiency - (510) 649-1930

Youth Emergency Assistance Hostel - (510) 848-1424

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