1. It was a gorgeous summer day…

It was a gorgeous summer day when I learned that Steve Shields had just been found dead, face down in a stream in Auburn, New York.

Some of his friends sat with me that day at the soup kitchen where I often have lunch and told me that Steve had left their group the preceding Friday evening to return to his regular sleeping spot under a bridge along the Owasco River in the downtown area.

When he didn’t rejoin them on Saturday, friends went to look for him. They didn’t find him in any of his usual places and assumed he’d gone to stay for a couple of days at an area relative’s house, something he was known to do from time to time.

Sadly, Steve’s body was spotted by a passerby traveling over the bridge four days later.

A man who was with him that fateful night reported that Steve had fallen and hit his head on a rock. Assuming that he’d just “sleep it off,” the man hadn’t contacted authorities for help.

Some people feared foul play because the man who was with him had been seen the next day wearing Steve’s cherished baseball cap but others wondered whether he might have experienced a seizure and fallen. He had previously suffered a head injury, they told me, and often forgot to take his medication.

Steve was a sweet, kind, upbeat and charming man whom I’d met about a month earlier. He was 48 years old, disabled, and he had a history of homelessness.

Across our country, premature deaths of homeless people may not be investigated very thoroughly or even recorded accurately. In San Francisco, as an example, a city official reported in 2011 that 28 deaths of homeless people had been recorded that year.

The Coalition on Homelessness, however, collected the names of 60 homeless people who had died in San Francisco in 2011; names added to the list by contacts of the deceased brought the total close to 100, about the same number as in 2010.

To their credit, Auburn detectives initiated an “unattended death” investigation immediately and we read in the newspaper later that his body had been sent to the medical examiner for autopsy.

A report was released to his family but it was not made public.  We never learned Steve’s official cause or manner of death although, early in the investigation, a police spokesperson had told a reporter for the local newspaper that nothing as of that time indicated that it was a homicide.

People at lunch that day were distraught but one man seemed much quieter than usual. He was not one of Steve’s closest friends but he helped out at the soup kitchen every day.  He would generally come up to my car as soon as I arrived and walk with me to the entrance door of the church, chatting continuously about ways to obtain help for some of the other people who congregated there each weekday.

He had never requested anything for himself but when I talked with him that day, he mentioned that he’d like to visit the area downtown where Steve had lived and died.

Steve’s body had been found in an area fronted by a big, ongoing, hotel construction project. That site and the areas beyond it were rigidly cordoned off by a chain link fence.

We walked all around the outer perimeter of the site for a couple of hours and over the bridge on both sides of the street, anticipating that we would spot bright yellow police tape at the scene of Steve’s death but the foliage in the area was so dense, we couldn’t figure out precisely where his body had been found.

We did notice an area by the far back corner of the construction site fence where there was a narrow, muddy opening and we wondered if that were the route by which Steve got into the area that was his sleeping spot at night and back out again in the morning.

We learned later that Steve’s funeral services would be private so, in a very sad way, this walk turned out to be our own “wake” for him. It had given us an opportunity to grieve together while immersed in Steve’s own home area.

Jim O’Connell, MD, founder of Boston Health Care for the Homeless, is the leading researcher in the United States on the death rates of homeless people. He commented to a reporter for The Dartmouth in 2010, “People who live on the streets of cities in America have the highest mortality rate of any subgroup, bar none.”

I already knew that the average age at time of death for a chronically homeless person is 46 while the life expectancy of a housed American is 77 but the isolation and desolation of Steve’s premature and tragic death at age 48 in this sunny, lively downtown environment personalized that abstract academic data in a manner that stunned me.

Tragically, Steve’s death was not the first death of a homeless person in the downtown area of this small city that I’d heard about in recent years; another man had been found dead in the back of a car in 2006.

I’d been involved in homelessness awareness activities for some time but on the day of this walk, I made up my mind to shed an even brighter light on this harsh, degrading and truly deadly social and cultural phenomenon that I’d been studying for nearly ten years.

I also resolved to take action myself and to do whatever I could to help bring an end to the ongoing national violation of our most basic human rights to housing, to clean water and to safe sanitation and I decided then and there to use my teaching, counseling and advocacy skills to help get those homeless people at highest risk of death off the streets.

Finally, I resolved to write a series of articles about chronic homelessness. For whatever our reasons, we seem to treat homeless animals with much greater care and concern in our country than we do homeless human beings – but people are  entitled to shelter and ethical treatment too.

This is the first installment in my series. I invite you to return to this site to read more as it’s posted.

© 2012 Mary M. McLaughlin, PhD. All rights reserved.