Fatal conditions

You could often find Wilson Grant Tyler at the chess tables at City Plaza.

He went by Grant, and he was described as kind, quiet and soft-spoken. The 61-year-old was well-liked and loved to read—especially works of nonfiction. He’d devour any newspaper he could get his hands on and stayed up-to-date with the investigations surrounding President Donald Trump.

Tyler was also homeless, and he suffered a health emergency near the bathrooms at the plaza about two weeks ago, on June 10, according to Chico police. First responders attempted CPR before he was taken to a hospital, where he died two days later. The listed causes of death were multiple organ failure, acute respiratory failure and community-acquired pneumonia, according to the Coroner’s Office.

“He shouldn’t have died at the plaza,” Richard Muenzer, a friend of Tyler’s and member of the Greater Chico Homeless Task Force, recently told the CN&R. “When did a civilized nation say it was OK to die on the streets? When did a first-world nation—a leader in civil rights—say it’s OK to die in the streets?”

Tyler was the second Chico homeless person to die this month. On June 3, 47-year-old Jason Hicks was found dead near a business at East Fourth and Wall streets. His cause of death is pending, according to the Coroner’s Office. Several other homeless people have died while living on the streets this year, advocates say. Tracking those deaths, however, has proven incomplete in the county.

The Butte County Sheriff’s Office sent the CN&R data this week indicating it had only two confirmed “transient” deaths in 2018, and only one so far this year. The data did not include Tyler’s death, nor Hicks’. It also didn’t include that of Vance Lee, who died March 2 (see “Deadly status quo,” Second & Flume, June 6), or that of Thomas Avakian, who died Jan. 23, 2018 (see “Death on the streets,” Newslines, Feb. 2, 2018).

The Coroner’s Office currently does not explicitly track homeless deaths. However, Mike Thompson, an analyst for the Sheriff’s Office, said that he has set the issue for review to develop an efficient way to monitor those numbers.

Chico Police Chief Mike O’Brien told the CN&R this week that the police department tracks all deaths in the city. That information, however, was not available by press time.

Homeless advocates point to the recent deaths as highlighting an urgent need for unrestricted—or low-barrier—shelters where sobriety and other requirements are not mandated. Specifically, several mentioned the Orange Street Shelter, which was proposed by Safe Space Winter Shelter, but whose grant funding was pulled following community opposition. Such shelters, they said, could save and extend lives.

Muenzer, who is homeless, said he supported the Orange Street Shelter, adding that such a facility near downtown could better serve the city’s homeless population that congregates there.

Tyler, in fact, had been excited about the idea of the Orange Street Shelter opening near downtown, according to Sandra O’Neill, a longtime homeless advocate. He had used the city’s Depot Park emergency warming center and said he liked that they didn’t ask questions there.

“I think he knew how ill he was,” O’Neill said. “He was very interested because it’s low-barrier, but he wasn’t a drinker—it was not that. I think for Grant it was a principle thing. You have to have independence and freedom.”

O’Neill also criticized so-called “quality-of-life laws” such as the city’s sit/lie and anti-camping ordinances.

“Whose lives are you talking about,” O’Neill said, “and is it worth your being uncomfortable when you walk around downtown and having people die from your laws?”

The Chico Police Department’s Target Team, a specialized unit that comprises a sergeant and three officers, is tasked with addressing chronic issues of crime in the city, and it also takes on much of the department’s homeless outreach efforts.

Chico police Sgt. Cesar Sandoval, who leads the unit, says homelessness is the biggest issue on the team’s plate. Persistently pushing services is the focus. One challenge, the sergeant says, is a large percentage of the city’s homeless population does not want to use services that are already available, for a variety of reasons.

At times, when shelters aren’t full, citations are written for camping. Officers also conduct outreach: They recently reconnected a regular downtown heroin user with his father, for instance.

Homeless advocate O’Neill recalled Tyler having been given a citation in the weeks before his death. She pointed to programs like low-barrier shelters as offering settings that can provide stability and reduce stress factors from living on the street, such as being being cited or rousted from sleep and asked to move along by a police officer or searching for refuge from the elements.

But finding the community will to offer services such as the Orange Street Shelter has been the challenge, they said.

“Safe Space had the opportunity to add 100 shelter beds in Chico,” said Angela McLaughlin, board president of Safe Space. “And not only did we not do anything … the president of the university wrote a letter opposing that. Community members—4,500-5,000 community members—signed a petition opposing that.

“We’re becoming more polarized,” she continued. “It feels like a breakdown of whatever social contract we ever had here. There have always been people who couldn’t work—couldn’t function—and in a lot of communities they were taken care of. Now it’s shifted [from] beyond no one is taking care of these folks [to] we should offer no services. It’s insane how we’re falling down.”