St. Elizabeth keeps Santa Fe's homeless off the streets-but that doesn't mean they are safe.
It was still morning when Randy O'Brien set out to talk with his best friend.
The bull-necked former boxer bounded down the stairs from his one-bedroom apartment in Casa Cerrillos, a transitional housing complex for the homeless, strode across the neatly pruned courtyard and began knocking on apartment Number 5.
Originally from South Boston, O'Brien used to own a construction company in Santa Fe before he drank it into the ground three years ago. After losing his job, his family and his home, O'Brien hit the streets hard and kept drinking.
During the spring of 2003, he moved into Casa Cerrillos, tucked inconspicuously behind a strip-mall shopping center, seductively close to the sweet smelling pints, bottles and brews on the shelves of De Arco Liquors just around the corner. It was at Casa Cerrillos where O'Brien met Mario Gonzales.
The two made an odd pair-the hulking, foul-mouthed fighter from "Southie" and the overweight, good-natured norteño from Santa-but they talked all the time. They talked about the gallon of vodka O'Brien used to pour into his 200-pound frame every day. They talked about the crack Gonzales used to smoke. And they talked about how hard it was to stay clean and sober-one of the rules at Casa Cerrillos, owned and operated by St. Elizabeth Shelter.
The morning of Oct. 30, though, Gonzales didn't answer the door. O'Brien finally shoved open the door and there was his friend, lying in bed, eyes open, one hand shoved down the front of his pants "just like Al Bundy," O'Brien says.
O'Brien rushed into the room to check Gonzales' pulse, but he was already dead.
"I know it was fucking drugs," O'Brien says some two weeks later, as he contemplates how a 38-year-old man can be alive one night and lifeless the next morning. "I've been on the streets long enough, been around enough death to know drugs when I see it."
Indeed, a significant portion of Casa Cerrillos residents still battle the addictions that accompany their homelessness.
Gonzales, however, wasn't a resident of the facility. He was an employee of St. Elizabeth and lived at Casa Cerrillos as its resident manager.
His death-still under review by both police and the shelter's board of directors-is one of several incidents and issues creating serious problems for the prominent Santa Fe non-profit.
Over the past few months, deep rifts over St. Elizabeth's policies and procedures have led to two firings and three resignations. Two board members also have stepped down.
At the heart of the dispute is the shelter's failure to adequately oversee a number of critical areas regarding its care of the homeless. As Gonzales' death indicates, drug and alcohol use is not nearly as tightly controlled as some believe it should be. At the main shelter itself, health and safety screenings of the homeless fail to meet basic standards used by most shelters throughout the country. Moreover, the two fired employees-St. Elizabeth's most recent director and a high-ranking administrator-say when they tried to address these issues they were ignored and subsequently terminated.
"I was trying to improve conditions for the people at the shelter and help change a potentially unsafe situation for both the homeless and the agency, but they weren't ready to deal with it," former director Charee Lord says.
St. Elizabeth Board of Directors President Gary Haug would not specifically address the shelter's personnel problems. But with a new director slated to take over Nov. 28, he acknowledges the obvious:
"It has been a difficult few months for St. Elizabeth."
Perhaps harder than it needed to be.
Casa Cerrillos Supportive Living Program is like purgatory.
It's a place where people are given one last chance to scrub clean their sins before fate determines whether they are granted a fresh start in a permanent home or a cold life on the Santa Fe streets.
St. Elizabeth bought the property in 1998 to serve as the shelter's long-term housing facility. A barren, two-level rectangular complex surrounding a grass courtyard, Casa Cerrillos could well have been plucked out of East Berlin's industrial bloc neighborhoods and dropped down onto Santa Fe's south side.
Its 28 residents-referred by various social service agencies-pay a reduced rent and continue to receive treatment while in residence. The idea of the facility is to transition residents back into society, as most were homeless at one point. Some are physically handicapped. Many still struggle with drug and alcohol addictions.
At similar programs throughout the country, there's no room for relapse. One sip of liquor, one hit of something harder and you're out, according to Marlene Gordon, executive director of the Coalition for the Homeless in Louisville, Ky.
"It jeopardizes everyone else's sobriety if a resident is still using," Gordon, who spearheads an interagency task force that monitors shelters in Louisville, says. "It's hard enough trying to quit smoking around people who smoke. Try doing that with drugs and alcohol."
At Casa Cerrillos, however, residents receive three warnings before they are evicted. Sometimes those warnings accompany life-or-death situations.
For example, last July resident Willie LaMonda shoved nearly 40 pills of Phenobarbital (a barbiturate anti-seizure medicine) into his mouth and began swigging liquor. An ambulance rushed LaMonda to St. Vincent Hospital. He survived.
"We'd been trying to get him into treatment," Barbara Mondragon, former program manager for Casa Cerrillos and current manger of St. Elizabeth's main shelter, says. "Ultimately, he was evicted."
LaMonda's relapse aside, Mondragon mostly had been able to keep residents clean and sober while she was in charge. But last September, Mondragon was transferred to the main shelter. St. Elizabeth hired a new program manager for Casa Cerrillos, Melissa Rodriguez, and things changed.
Born to a Lakota Standing Rock Sioux father and a part Irish/German mother in Fairbanks, Alaska, Rodriguez dropped out of high school when she was 15 and spent three years living on the streets.
Sharp and motivated, Rodriguez eventually went back to high school and was accepted to prestigious Brandeis University in Massachusetts where she earned a bachelor's degree in sociology. From there, Rodriguez knew there was only one path for her.
"I just felt a kinship with the homeless," the 30-year-old Rodriguez-pretty with dark hair, pale skin and flashing brown eyes-says. "It was something I could relate to."
After working as a counselor at an assortment of outpatient and transitional living programs for Alaska natives, Rodriguez moved to Santa Fe with her husband, an economist for the state, and was hired by St. Elizabeth.
Despite her deep personal understanding of homelessness, Rodriguez was not well-liked by the Casa Cerrillos residents who, according to numerous accounts, began using drugs and alcohol again almost as soon as she arrived.
"They were testing Melissa," Mondragon says.
Faced with such brazen violations, Rodriguez cracked down. To start with, Rodriguez administered urinalysis tests to residents she suspected of being drunk or high. It was a tool Mondragon also had utilized to keep residents in line and a common practice at transitional living programs.
"Relapses are expected," Mondragon says. "It happens."
On Oct. 13, Rodriguez administered tests to three residents. Two of the results came back positive-one for cocaine, marijuana and opiates, the other for marijuana and opiates.
Rodriguez then presented the results to St. Elizabeth interim director Nancy McDonald.
McDonald, a slight, blonde woman from New Jersey, had worked for years in soup kitchens and battered women's homes on the East Coast. She was hired by St. Elizabeth in 2004 to run a day center for the homeless and made interim director in September.
Rodriguez says McDonald never responded to her concerns about the three residents who had tested positive. At the same time, Rodriguez was growing increasingly alarmed about Mario Gonzales, the popular resident manager of Casa Cerrillos. Gonzales lived on the site and Rodriguez was certain he was drinking on the job.
"Mario's behavior looked familiar to me," she says. "I'd be having a conversation with him and there'd be blank look on his face. You'd ask him to do something and he'd forget. He didn't seem to be altogether there."
Gonzales, she says, was someone "who had a history of homelessness and was very much like a client. He would go to the case managers for help with issues he was dealing with."
After searching the apartment of a Casa Cerrillos resident she suspected was drinking with Gonzales and finding beer bottles strewn everywhere, Rodriguez discussed her concerns with other St. Elizabeth administrators. Soon after, a second resident Rodriguez found drunk one day casually informed Rodriguez she should be checking her own staff. She knew the resident was talking about Gonzales.
Before Rodriguez could take action, however, McDonald interceded.
"She called me into her office and told me, 'I heard you want to fire Mario, well you can't do anything,'" Rodriguez says.
McDonald, who declined comment on the situation specifically, says she was unaware of any potential problems with Gonzales.
"I did pass Melissa's concerns by the board and they told me nobody was to be fired," she says. "There was never any question about him drinking that was raised to me."
Meanwhile, Casa Cerrillos residents had grown restive with Rodriguez's hardball approach.
On Oct. 17, a group of residents signed a seven-paragraph petition complaining about Rodriguez and presented it to McDonald.
"We realize that everyone has a different way of doing things but the lack of compassion in dealing with various problems that each of us have is doing more harm than good," the petition reads.
Later that week, with the situation at Casa Cerrillos becoming tense, Barbara Mondragon fired off her own letter to the board criticizing McDonald's handling of the situation and her failure to back Rodriguez.
Her letter also points out the Casa Cerrillos residents were openly drinking and using drugs and that she'd spoken to one resident who was moving out "because he did not know how long he could fight the temptation of being surrounded by so much alcohol and drugs."
Nonetheless, on Oct. 24, Nancy McDonald fired Melissa Rodriguez because of "insubordination, concerns raised by two collaborative agencies and the Casa Cerrillos residents' petition," according to a letter obtained by SFR. McDonald would not discuss the decision.
Rodriguez was furious. She'd been on the job for less than two months and, in her mind, was simply enforcing St. Elizabeth's own policies, ones that are in place to keep the residents safe and healthy. She filed a grievance with the board and discussed hiring a lawyer with her husband.
"I was shocked," she says. "I didn't understand how she could be firing me. I was doing my job."
It's a sentiment Charee Lord understands well.
It was early autumn of 2004 when Charee Lord left the lush
serenity of upstate New York's Hudson River Valley and set off for northern New Mexico to take over as St. Elizabeth's new director.
On paper the position looked good. St. Elizabeth-or St. E's as it's affectionately called-has come a long way since 1986 when it first started operating out of a rented building on Don Gaspar Avenue. Shortly after, St. Elizabeth began an ambitious expansion. It moved its main emergency shelter to the old United Way building at 804 Alarid Street, offered longer term living at various housing complexes and funneled the overflow of single men from its main shelter to the Salvation Army building on West Alameda Street.
Despite a nationwide crunch for non-profits, St. Elizabeth's finances have stayed in relatively good shape. The shelter operates on approximately $1 million a year, pulling 35 percent of its money from government agencies such as HUD and 32 percent from private donors.
The rest comes from a variety of sources, such as the rent from its transitional housing programs.
St. E's stable finances have always allowed its shelters and transitional living accommodations to be well-kept and relatively comfortable-a far cry from its big city counterparts, which sometimes have monstrous reputations.
"I remember visiting St. E's a few years back," Michael Stoops, acting executive director of National Coalition for the Homeless (NCH), says. "What a great little shelter."
But from the start, Lord, who has extensive experience managing shelters in California and New York, saw red flags everywhere.
The most glaring problems were at St. Elizabeth's main shelter, which typically provides food and beds to 32 homeless men, women and children every night. In all the shelters Lord had ever worked at or known about, single men were always housed in separate facilities from women and children.
It was a simple rule for a simple reason: Allowing homeless men-sometimes fresh out of prison, reeling from drink or drugs or battling untold psychological problems-in close proximity to women and children is asking for trouble.
At St. Elizabeth, however, everyone lives under the same roof. Further, the single men's quarters-a tight track of bunks something like a sleepaway camp dorm-is just down the hall from where homeless children sleep in a similar style room.
"Those dynamics are not normal," Lord, a youthful looking grandmother at 57 with crisply cropped blonde hair, says. "It's the first time I've ever seen something like that."
Louisville Coalition for the Homeless Executive Director Gordon agrees.
"It's not appropriate, and it's not safe," Gordon says. "Families, women and single men all should be housed in separate buildings. The shelter needs to decide which demographic it's going to taking care of."
Gordon, whose task force is one of only a few shelter monitoring mechanisms in the entire country, says the current setup at St. Elizabeth's main shelter would have to change in order for the shelter to operate in Louisville.
"It's not healthy for anyone," she says. "Many homeless women and children have been victims of domestic violence, and you're supposed to be promising them a safe place."
Board President Haug is a warm, easygoing man whose silvery Captain Nemo beard befits the time he spent in the Navy during the early '70s. Former executive director of the New Mexico Commission for the Blind, Haug worked for a decade for the New Mexico Vocational Rehabilitation Division and the Human Services Department. Haug concedes the living situation at the main shelter is not ideal.
"This is something we're aware of," Haug, who was elected board president last January after three years as a member, says. "But we also have to look at the alternatives. We don't want to turn people away from our shelter."
The sleeping quarters, though, were only the beginning for Lord, who previously ran Francis Ford Coppola's homeless charity, North Beach Citizens, and dealt with the dope-ridden hustlers, downtrodden hippies and wild-eyed Vietnam vets who drift among the Bay Area's colorful homeless population.
She also was baffled that St. Elizabeth didn't screen the homeless for tuberculosis, an airborne disease that historically runs dangerously rampant in the cramped quarters of a homeless shelter.
Because the disease is so contagious, most shelters throughout the country conduct some sort of screening, Marlene Gordon says. Louisville shelters, in fact, require homeless to be tested for tuberculosis within seven days of checking into a facility.
"When you put people in such close proximity, it can really be dangerous," she says.
Finally, and most significantly, Lord was shocked to learn St. Elizabeth didn't have any system in place to check for sex offenders, a paramount concern for most shelters and homeless advocates.
"The shelter was not running the clients through a sex offender database as they should have," Lord says. "Homeless women are especially vulnerable and need to know that they're being given a safe space."
Lord took her concerns about all these issues to other St. Elizabeth administrators but says she got only "lip service." When nothing happened, Lord approached the board during an April retreat.
"The reaction was 'yes we should be doing this,' so I went back to the staff and told staff to get on it but nothing happened," Lord says.
In July, some of Lord's concerns began to manifest.
According to Lord, police arrested a known sex offender who'd been staying at St. Elizabeth. "I was upset," Lord says. "I knew we had families living there and so it was a big concern. Finally, I printed out a national list of sex offenders myself and had them start checking."
Haug, who acknowledges the sex offender likely stayed at St. Elizabeth for a few days, says the board mulled over ways to beef up its screening process immediately following the incident. (Although both Lord and Haug acknowledge the incident, neither the Santa Fe County Sheriff's Department, Santa Fe Police or New Mexico State Police have a record of the arrest.)
Despite Lord's push for increased diligence, the disturbing incidents continued.
On the afternoon of July 12, Santa Fe Police arrived at St. Elizabeth's main shelter to investigate the death of Eulalio Cruz, a homeless man with a history of congestive heart failure. According to police records, the 56-year-old
Cruz likely died sometime during the night before or early that morning, yet staff didn't call the authorities until 2:53 pm, hours after Cruz lay dead or dying in his dorm bed.
Lord says shelter workers often let Cruz nap during the day because of his condition but he should not have been ignored for so long.
"Staff was supposed to do bed checks every morning but apparently they weren't," Lord says. "At some point, he should have been discovered."
Meanwhile, Lord's demand for changes began to get her in trouble. In August, some staff members began complaining to the board.
"It was clear I was going to make changes," she says. "We were going to have different policies and procedures. We were going to check sex offenders, we were going to test for tuberculosis, we were going to have standards that other shelters have. The attitude was 'this is the way we've been doing things and we're not going to change.'"
A month later, the board voted to dismiss Lord.
"In general, the board was dissatisfied with her leadership," Haug says.
Within two months of Lord's firing, two board members stepped down.
Carlos Valdez, the board's vice president and an employee with the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department, would not comment on his resignation.
"The board has some issues it needs to deal with, and I'm confident they will," Valdez says.
Kate McDowell, a realtor with French & French Sotheby's International Realty and a St. Elizabeth board member for fewer than six months, is more pointed.
"I do not think Charee should have been fired," McDowell says. "Whatever management problems existed could have been easily solved and we could have been moving forward to make the shelter a success."
While McDowell wouldn't go into specifics, she says Lord's firing contributed to her decision.
An ex-employee of St. Elizabeth who requested anonymity agrees the board was unfair in its treatment of Lord.
"Basically, it was a hostile work environment in all directions, especially in the way investigations were handled and the lack of support Charee received from the board."
It is this environment St. Elizabeth's newly hired director now faces.
Deborah Tang has big plans for St. Elizabeth.
The incoming St. Elizabeth director says she wants to conduct a comprehensive assessment of St. Elizabeth staff, policies and systems to see what's working and what's not.
Tang also tells SFR she'll likely suggest that the board use capital outlay money to help build separate sleeping facilities for women and children.
"It would go towards a safe, adequate new shelter that has all the necessary precautions," Tang, who has worked at shelters and transitional living programs in northern California and New Mexico, says. "I think this is a great place, and I'm excited about providing a much needed service for a community a lot of people don't tend to think much about in a place like Santa Fe."
Further, Tang wants to implement a zero tolerance policy at Casa Cerrillos for drug and alcohol use.
"That's the way I've run shelters in the past. I don't see any reason why that shouldn't continue," she says.
Casa Cerrillos' new program manager, Bernie Lieving, sees things differently.
"For me, it's unrealistic to think that people living with concurring disorders, or who are ex-cons, who have dealt with a lot of trauma, can suddenly transform themselves," he says. "My mission, I feel, is to engage with the residents and help them through the recovery process."
Lieving says he'll ask Tang for 30 days to establish order once more at Casa Cerrillos. As for a long-term approach, he wants to intensify already existing resident outpatient programs and keep a watchful eye on anyone who shows even the slightest sign of a relapse.
"I have already conveyed to the residents that things need to change," Lieving says. "We need to get this program back to the point where we're engaged with the residents to keep them from using, where the resident manager doesn't die of a heroin overdose."
It was still morning when Randy O'Brien found his best friend
dead.
O'Brien was so busy searching desperately for a pulse and then calling the police that he didn't even notice the syringe of brown liquid sitting nearby Mario Gonzales' lifeless body.
SFPD Spokesman Eric Johnson says Gonzales' death is being considered a possible drug overdose but that police are still waiting for a toxicology report from the state medical investigator's office.
Board President Haug says St. Elizabeth's board is still reviewing the situation to see if its policies need revision. When asked if St. Elizabeth should have probed Gonzales' history more and kept him on a tighter leash, Haug responds:
"Our hiring policies cannot predict an individual's behavior," he says. "We take a lot of risks with folks on the margins of society."
That risky work does not go unnoticed. Everyone interviewed for this story-even those who left St. E's on bad terms-praised the staff for their hard work and compassion in working with people who have lost nearly everything.
People like O'Brien, whose melancholy blue eyes betray the hard life he's lived. He still can't believe Gonzales, his friend, is gone.
"I'm so pissed he didn't tell me he was using," O'Brien says. "He never talked about it."
Melissa Rodriguez was less shocked.
A few days after she was fired from St. Elizabeth, she was shopping in Walgreen's when she noticed a familiar figure buying a large bottle of Jack Daniel's. It was Mario Gonzales.
"I called the case manager at Casa Cerrillos and told her," Rodriguez says.
By then it was too late.
