Beneath the Bridges of Overtown

I first encountered Tabitha in my work on the streets of Overtown, Miami. Overtown is Miami’s poorest neighborhood. I believe the median income in Overtown is probably around $14,000 a year. It’s a very poor, 90 percent black, maybe 10 percent Hispanic neighborhood. And it’s got a fairly large homeless population that sleeps primarily underneath bridges.

Interstate 95 and the highways that go through Miami and lead into Miami Beach all intersect through Overtown, and so you’ll see a very large homeless population sleeping underneath those bridges. In fact, outside of downtown, that’s probably Miami’s largest concentration of people experiencing homelessness.

In the late winter, early February or March 2018, I started hearing very troubling reports that the City of Miami was conducting systematic city-wide sweeps of homeless encampments under the guise of cleaning the street. They were evicting people from areas and ordering them never to come back again. They were posting up police cars in certain areas with lights flashing and moving the homeless out, and I also heard troubling reports that their property was being summarily destroyed. These things are all in direct violation of a federal consent decree that had governed how police were supposed to interact with the homeless in Miami for the last 20 years—the Pottinger Consent Decree, which I’m a class representative in.

So when I started hearing about these actions starting in March of 2018, I just went out into the streets to investigate what was going on and started talking to people. And that’s when I first started hearing about Tabitha.

People kept telling me, “Talk to Tabitha, talk to Tabitha. She’ll tell you what’s going on.” So I finally tracked her down. She was a Caucasian girl in her mid-to-late thirties, and she was sleeping on the streets underneath the bridge in Overtown with her boyfriend. I wanted to meet her to find out about the police crackdown and the criminalization of homelessness in Overtown.

And there was good news and bad news.

Making the Connection with Tabitha

In outreach, you’re always going to run across folks that will be very hesitant to talk to you, in fact even hostile to you. It’s because of the trauma on the streets. You have to protect yourself, especially in a time when the police are cracking down. It can be very difficult to reach out.

Tabitha, on the other hand—once she understood who I was and why I was out there—was very willing to talk to me. And she really provided the spark, the nuggets of information that I needed in order to report back to the American Civil Liberties Union, who in turn went ahead and sued the city about two months later.

Tabitha had substance abuse issues. It was very obvious that she was an injector. But one thing that really struck me was her very high level of intelligence when I met her.

She was extremely intelligent, very articulate. And she basically told me the time, place, and manner of what was going to happen, what had happened in the past, and what was going to happen in the very near future. She told me when these “clean-ups” were going to happen. She told me to come out there with a camera, and I would actually witness the police violating a federal consent decree and witness property destruction.

And what she said was true. I filmed it, and the video became a central part of our court testimony when we wanted to hold the city in contempt for violating the decree.

The Woman and the Writer

I thought her life encapsulated many of the issues that we run across with respect to housing, health care, and the criminalization of homelessness. I got to know her personally, and it affected me when she passed away.

She came from upstate New York. I did ask her [how she became homeless]. I got hints that there may have been some domestic abuse that led her to leave. I don’t know the details—her face would always darken when she talked about why she left. It was not a happy circumstance.

She was getting clean needles through a harm reduction pilot program at the University of Miami, but it was not primary care. When I showed up later on the morning when I learned she died, I was trying to get her more connected with Camillus Health Care so she could get actual primary, dental, and wound care.

[Her day-to-day life] was probably a lot like many opiate users. Where you wake up in the morning, and you need that morning fix. She had talked about going into rehab, getting off of drugs.

And she was a writer. She kept journals. You know the more you talked to her the more interesting she was—she was so much more complex than the stereotype people have. She had hopes and dreams. She had potential. She had a talent for writing, and she wanted to develop that.

Each moment [with her] was different. She just had a very funny, sarcastic, ironic sense of humor. Very playful. I guess the funniest thing she said was when I showed up a little after eating a very sloppy hot dog for lunch. I showed up to interview her and ask her about the things that were going on, and she looked at me and said, “Hey, I can always tell what you had for lunch.” I was like, “You can tell what I had for lunch?” She said, “Yeah, by looking at your shirt.” Everybody just broke up laughing.

She really showed me once again that who we’re dealing with are real human beings out here who have families. Despite the fact that she’s struggling with certain issues—addiction, substance use—nevertheless, she’s a person entitled to dignity, respect, and what many people consider fundamental rights to housing and health care.

And she got neither of those. 

“I’ve known dozens [of people who have died on the streets]. To me her story was simply the most direct relationship I could see that links the criminalization of homelessness and an actual death. I certainly draw that link; anyone can.

I’ve been doing my work for about six years now, and at least two or three people a year that I know pass away on the streets, mostly because of health issues that arise from homelessness. Heart disease, complications from diabetes. I had a very good friend that died last year from COPD. She was a smoker. She stopped smoking, but it was too late, and being on the streets, it was very hard for her to always get inhalers, and she had issues keeping up with her meds. She just passed away last year, and I don’t even think she was 40.

Life on the streets is rough. And it makes it so concrete, so vivid to me that health care truly is housing. Living on the streets makes any health condition you have worse. It creates new health conditions, and it sometimes makes it impossible for you to take your meds—especially when police destroy property.

What people are most concerned with is protecting their possessions, getting food in their stomach, dealing more with immediate survival issues. The health care issues only come up by the time that they get so severe that you go to an ER. A lot of people do understand the need to go to primary care, but they’ll have some survival issues in front of them.” – David Peery

“Criminalization of homelessness is misusing the criminal justice system to penalize individuals who are performing life-sustaining activities on the streets. These are people who have no other place to perform them, because they have no home. So it is really using a power of the state, municipality, city, or county to use the criminal justice system against people who lack homes.

You’re arresting them for offenses like sleeping in public, eating, littering, loitering. You’re basically applying the criminal justice system inappropriately to social issues. These folks are not criminals. They simply lack a house. And so we really should be employing social work remedies to folks who lack houses. We should obviously try to find them housing, try to connect them with necessary health care, food, clothing.

Using the criminal justice system against people just makes matters worse. It traumatizes people, and they had trauma in the first place to end up on the streets. You’re compounding that by making them into criminals. Then it’s much harder for them to get jobs or housing because they’ll have a criminal record. It makes it so much harder for the individual to get their act together when they’re constantly in and out of jail. 

It’s also much more expensive to jail them than to give them an apartment. It’s a kneejerk reaction that businesses and municipal leaders employ in order to cleanse the streets of the unsightly homelessness problem, but it really makes the problem much, much worse. In my opinion, it’s inherently cruel and immoral.” – David Peery

Waking Up to an Arrest

Shortly after I met her, Tabitha was falsely arrested with her boyfriend. We actually have police body cam footage that shows the tragic circumstances surrounding it. Under the Pottinger Consent Decree there’s certain activities, that if you’re caught doing them on a city street and are homeless, the police must offer you shelter before they arrest you.

If there’s no shelter available, they can’t arrest you. Obstructing the sidewalks is one of those minor offenses. And if you’re sleeping on a sidewalk and obstructing it, the consent decree requires police to warn you to move to stop obstructing it and sleep in such a way that people can pass. Only then, if you refuse, can they arrest you.

However, the footage clearly shows that she was sleeping on a mattress that was not perpendicular but parallel to the sidewalk. People could walk by. But it shows the police driving up, walking up to her, waking her up, and asking her for ID. She had no ID, and they said, “Okay, we’re going to arrest you.”

At this point her boyfriend was protesting and saying, “Hey, please don’t arrest her. She was hit by a car yesterday. She’s in bad shape. Please, please.” They ignored him. They went ahead and arrested her and put her into the car.

The video shows that she asked, “Why am I being arrested?” And the officer says, “For obstructing the sidewalk.” That’s a gross violation of the decree because you have to warn them. And the footage shows that she wasn’t even doing that in the first place.

So she spent Easter weekend in jail. This was on a Friday, so she spent Friday night, Saturday night, and Sunday night in jail. It was the following Monday before they threw out the charges, and then she got released.

“It Hit Me Like a Ton of Bricks”

Fast forward to the tragic circumstances: 10 days later she was dead from heart failure. She had endocarditis, a bacterial infection of the heart valve which is not uncommon to folks who inject drugs. That was worsened not only by her being in an accident when a car hit her a day before the arrest, but also by being arrested and taken to jail instead of given medical treatment—or being connected with housing, for that matter.

But for the false arrest I think she would have been able to seek medical treatment over the weekend. Instead she was sent to jail. When she came out her condition was much worse. And 10 days later she died as a result.

That’s my opinion. I’ve talked to lawyers and medical people, and there’s not a direct causation. You can’t say that the police killed her. But you can say that because they criminalize homelessness, she was not given access to the care she needed to survive.

I think that shows the tragic consequences of criminalizing homelessness. Her sleeping on the streets was not a criminal issue. It was a medical issue. It was a housing issue. She should have been given access to health care and housing. I firmly believe that if she’d been met with a social worker rather than handcuffs that Friday—and connected with services—it’s very likely that she’d be alive today.

Her death profoundly affected me. We’d actually talked, but I didn’t know about her degenerating condition after her release. Then one morning when I came to talk to her, I saw the look on the faces of the people around. They looked sick to their stomach. I said, “Hey everybody. Where’s Tabitha?” “Didn’t you hear?” they said. “She died this morning.” And I said, “Oh, my God.”

It hit me like a ton of bricks. Nobody saw it coming. It was not a result of an overdose or anything like that. I’d only known her for perhaps 6 weeks beforehand, but I got to know that she was a human being. She had the same hopes, dreams, fears, I think of anybody who is housed.

Epilogue to a Tragedy

It really hit me hard. It still hits me hard today. It’s been a little over a year and half now, but it still does.

Her mom and stepfather actually contacted me after they saw an article I had published in a Miami newspaper. They thanked me for the story, because they were also mystified as to how and why their daughter had died.

Her boyfriend went through a two-month spiral after her death. He was super-injecting, trying to kill himself through overdose. It was pretty bad. For a long time, he could only watch the first two minutes [of the video]—where she’s cuffed and put into the car—and he’d break down. Thankfully, he’s doing better now. He’s turned his life around.

And perhaps some good can come from Tabitha passing away, if it can show that we’re dealing with real people, real human beings. This isn’t just cleansing the streets of drug addicted homeless people. This was a tragic death.

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