CITIZEN JOURNALISM: ‘Nice lady’ dies outside shelter

CITIZEN JOURNALISM:

The office of D.C. Council member Tommy Wells is looking into the death of a homeless woman who had multiple health problems and was living on a bench outside a shelter.

Renee Page died on that wrought-iron bench on June 7. She was 51.

Wolfer King said he sensed something was wrong the last time he saw her because she sat slumped on the bench and wasn’t her normal, outspoken self.

“She just told me that she just got out of the hospital,” he said. “She showed me the band on her arm.”

She had diabetes, AIDS and pneumonia, residents said. Mr. King said he saw her drinking on the bench all the time.

“How is it that that lady lived there and died there on that bench?” asked a friend, Tawanda Glenn. “She didn’t deserve to die like that - on that bench.

Eric Sheptock, a resident at the Community for Creative Non-Violence (CCNV) shelter at Second and D streets Northwest, said Mrs. Page told him she had argued with another resident and had been evicted for one night. That incident occurred in mid-May.

Charles Allen, Mr. Wells’ chief of staff, said it’s too early to speculate about what happened to Mrs. Page but the council member would be concerned if Mrs. Page had been kicked out and was living right outside the shelter on a bench.

“If that were true, Mr. Wells would find that disturbing,” Mr. Allen said.

According to Mr. Allen, data in the city’s case-management system for homeless services show Mrs. Page lived at CCNV from April 14 through May 12.

Bernard Robinson, deputy executive director of CCNV, discounted the data. He said Mrs. Page stayed at the shelter from mid-March through March 31, the end of the hypothermia season.

“I used to see her during the day,” Mr. Robinson said. “But I don’t know where she was at night. I had no control over that.”

He speculated that Mrs. Page might have been accepted at another shelter. “When she left here, she might have went to John L. Young or Open Door shelters, which are all housed in this building,” Mr. Robinson said.

Nikita Wilson, case manager at Open Door, said Mrs. Page was not a resident there.

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