A Death On The Street

“Bushwick died!”

The guy standing on the stoop at the Five Points convenience store whispered, almost, which itself is remarkable. The raucous, ridiculous plaza bears no whispers. People shout in Asher Square. It’s next to a subway station, and freight train tracks, and traffic on three sides. It’s made for shouting, and for shouters. The dozen or so people who hang out there all day have made an Olympic sport of shouting at one another, usually about nothing important.

The prospect of killing cold taking one of their own had reduced Asher Square to sudden whispered sobriety. I picked his comment out of the wind on the way to catch MARTA and it stopped me, hard.

Because I was sure he was wrong.

I had just spent the last hour tracking down rumors of Bushwick’s death. At Woodruff Park I ran into Brandi, a friend of his who, like Bushwick, is intermittently homeless. Together we tromped through Grady’s refurbished emergency room waiting area, wading through the multitudes of people who were there mostly to escape frigid air, trying to find Bushwick. A harried hospital social worker shouted for a homeless man I knew as we waited for an overworked intake nurse to look for Bushwick by his name — his real name, which I happened to know because that’s my job and Bushwick is famous.

Everyone on the street downtown knows Bushwick, of course. He stands out in a manner of speaking. He’s about four-foot-eight and dead drunk most of the time. 

Brandi said she had managed to get him sober for two weeks, once. He’s a nice enough guy when he dries out. He has a sister around here, but they don’t get along. “She nags him about his drinking,” she said. “It’s not supportive.”

He and I had spoken a few times. Nothing serious, or particularly close. I’d asked his help once to keep an eye on Terry, who if anything is a more problematic alcoholic than he. Another time, I asked him to call me if he came across a sex trafficking victim the downtown community had been looking for. He had my card in his pocket at least once.

Mostly, he trundled between the street corner of Alabama at Broad and Walton Street, looking for ways to spend a disability check early in the month, posse in tow.

Rumors of the death of the Tyrion Lannister of Asher Square had been circulating for a couple of days. An Atlanta Police beat cop told me he had found Bushwick in a tunnel below the Popeyes at Five Points, shirtless and frozen. When the Grady paramedics put Bushwick’s tiny body on a stretcher, he rolled around stiff without even moving his arms, he said.

“If that guy ain’t dead, I’m gonna quit,” the cop told me later. “There’s no coming back from that.”

Bushwick would have no shelter. He’s been on my priority list of chronically homeless people downtown to move into treatment. I’ve asked him before to seek help at the Gateway Center and he told me to get lost. Those weren’t his exact words, of course.

The medical examiner told me Tuesday that they had no record of Bushwick, or anyone matching his description, coming through their doors. Grady didn’t have him, either. He’s no stranger to Grady, of course — chronic alcoholics downtown are the bane of Grady’s bottom line and the reason advocates are willing to move heaven and earth to find a way to get them into treatment and off the street. But Bushwick hadn’t been there since December.

I thought the cop was mistaken, and told him so when I ran into him outside of Anatolia a few minutes after leaving Grady. I told the fellow at Asher Square that Bushwick would be back.

I was wrong.

Grady didn’t have him, because he never made it there. The medical examiner’s office apparently had him as a John Doe, and my description of him wasn’t accurate enough for them to make the connection: I described him as a foot shorter than he actually is.

Hope presides where memory fails. I should know that by now.

**

It has been cold enough to kill over the last few weeks.

Any time the temperature falls below 40 degrees or so, hypothermia risk emerges, particularly for people who are living unsheltered on the street. My Facebook feed has been filling with images from the underpass near Grady Memorial Hospital downtown, of rows of men and women swaddled in a half-dozen blankets and thermal sleeping bags amid cardboard boxes and the accumulation of a life of misery.

“How can we allow this as a people?” we ask. “Where are the churches? Where is my government? Why isn’t anyone doing anything?!”

Which is the right response, generally. I would expect it of anyone with a moral center. It’s reasonable when seeing someone who looks like they’re going to freeze to death.

Police are investigating the hypothermia death of two homeless people in the last month or so. Bushwick is apparently one. The other person, an older woman, was found near the Gateway Center. According to the police report, cops found her around 9:30 in the morning on December 29, “wrapped in several blankets sleeping on a city sidewalk.” When they got closer, they found she wasn’t breathing. She appears to match one of the six in the medical examiner’s file, listed as “hypothermia aggravating hypertensive cardiovascular disease.” (It may not be her, though. We’ll see when the office opens.)

The temperature for the previous six hours had been between 34 and 40 degrees, with the trough falling two hours before police found her. The city’s warming centers had not yet been activated. The city has been aggressive about them since. I now understand why.

My problem, today, is that people see this and are inclined to believe additional things that simply are not true, because they comport with their pre-existing biases around the evil and indifference of society. Amid the decent and reasonable calls for more social services support, I find myself wading through enormous falsehoods about shelters turning people away for lack of room and people dying of the cold on the street as a result.

Chronic alcoholism is cited as a contributing factor in three of the deaths before Bushwick’s. A toxicology screen takes four to six weeks; the other deaths may end up being attributed to drug use. One may conclude that it’s not the lack of emergency shelter that’s causing deaths. It’s the lack of substance abuse treatment options.

The cold has a lot of people burning their credibility for warmth. For example, a post by Jason Winter (screenshot saved for posterity) claimed that an infant died of exposure among the people gathered under the Bell Street overpass. As nearly as I can tell, this didn’t happen. The coroner has no record of a two or three-year-old child dying of any cause since at least the 11th and certainly not of hypothermia. The police have no record of a call for service for a child under the bridge outside, or anything like it. I am told by social services workers from the city that Grady — which is right there — has no record of anything like this.

Winter’s post had been shared more than 8,000 times before he took it down, after the AJC and 11 Alive both fact checked it. For a Christian, Winter has been fairly unrepentant about treating the line about bearing false witness against one’s neighbor as more of a loose moral guideline than a hard rule.

One might ask why we should care if charitably-minded people are stretching the truth about people being turned away. My problem with it — other than that it’s untrue — is that if people believe there’s no room, they’re less inclined to try to seek shelter. The line between indifference and malice is blurry when we’re talking about folks who may be operating in a state of paranoia and impaired judgment.

Today, the warming stations are open. There is room. No one has been turned away from any of them.

Grant Park’s recreation center is open as a warming shelter today. When one fills up, the city and the Continuum of Care will open up another.

No one else needs to die.

If you are downtown, and have a relationship with a person experiencing homelessness, and would like to get them to shelter, call the Ambassador Force at 404-215-6600. We have an arrangement with Lyft and a charity called Common Courtesy, to transport people to shelter free of cost. If for whatever reason that doesn’t work, we’ll find a way.