Poverty, Capitalism, & Mental Health

Turlock native's suicide propels tenant crusade
She was homeless amid a rental crisis, but mentally ill, too
By LEE ROMNEY
LOS ANGELES TIMES

Last Updated: July 14, 2005, 07:09:52 AM PDT

OAKLAND — After scattering hundreds of copies of her suicide note from the seventh-floor ledge of a downtown building, Mary Jesus held her nose and raised an arm in the air.
Then, like a swimmer taking a plunge, the former Turlock woman leaped to her death.

"Goodbye cruel world and all that," read the note, in which she blamed her suicide on an eviction that she had battled fiercely — and unsuccessfully. "Everyone will say what they always say when something totally preventable isn't prevented, 'Why didn't anybody do anything?'"

In the seven months since her death at 33, Mary Jesus has become a symbol. Tenant leaders have highlighted her death as one of eviction's darkest consequences in an era of rising rents and an urgent shortage of affordable housing.

Landlords say they are not to blame and draw a different lesson.

They point to failings in a mental health system that, they say, should have rescued Mary Jesus long before she stepped onto that balcony in the Oakland Tribune newspaper tower.

Many Oakland tenants have been swept out of their apartments by an overheated housing market. Most go quietly. Mary Jesus — stubborn, articulate, unstable — orchestrated a final act of defiance.

Diagnosed with depression and borderline personality disorder, she was stable as long as she had stable housing. But like others in similar situations, once her sanctuary was threatened, she lost her grip.

'Broke the mold in Turlock'

She was born Mary Jesus Brazil to Catholic, Portuguese immigrant parents in Turlock.

A photo from age 6 shows her smiling in her bedroom, a pet bird perched on her head. Months later, she was bouncing from a domestic violence shelter to a cheap motel with her mother and siblings.

At age 10, Mary's family said, she found her mom in the kitchen with a wound to her chest, her father hovering with a butcher knife.

Her mother survived. Her father served prison time. They divorced.

Mary endured stints in foster homes, in juvenile hall and on the streets. With her 10-inch blue mohawk and counterculture views, "Mary just broke the mold in Turlock," said her oldest sister, Maria Kurtenbach, 45.

In the punk rock underground, she found like-minded spirits, uncompromising in their rejection of what they considered a sexist, class-based society.

She found her sanctuary in Apartment 15 on the first floor of a 1913 building on Oakland's Alice Street, a neighborhood of stately but dilapidated buildings in the shadow of downtown. The rent, when she moved in 14years ago, was $550 a month.

Mary refurbished the wood floors and hung black lace curtains. She painted the onebedroom unit black and red in a Japanese motif and decorated with her own paintings — dark explorations of death that challenged Christian symbolism.

Rents rise in dot-com boom

"She really loved the place," said Emmely Dittmann, who with her husband, Hans, owned the 30-unit building known as the Dunsmuir Apartments for decades. Mary looked to the couple as surrogate parents. They hired her as manager.

She took to wearing all black. She learned to garden. She cut ties with her family and, to purge her father from her past, she ditched the name Brazil, becoming, simply, Mary Jesus.

In 1998, as the dot-com boom swept the San Francisco Bay Area, the Dittmanns sold the building for $1.3 million to Mark Roemer and James L. Lewis, who were fast accruing Oakland properties.

As San Francisco refugees flooded Oakland, vacated units often rented at a 35 percent markup, said James Vann of Oakland's Tenants Union.

Landlords are now bound by a 2002 law that requires "just cause" for eviction. But during the boom's early days, a 30-day notice sufficed, even if a tenant was up to date on the rent. Anne Omura, director of Oakland's Eviction Defense Center, recalled "grabbing lawyers off the street" to help tenants fight evictions.

Roemer and Lewis could have served Mary Jesus with a 30-day notice.

But there was an initial truce. After she posted memos around the building noting that the new owners were violating the law by not having an on-site manager, they hired her, waiving her rent, as the Dittmanns had. She kept the building clean and welcomed newcomers.

The manager in black

She tacked notes of gratitude from tenants on her wall. "Thanks again for really pulling through for us," one couple wrote in May 1999. "It's a crazy war out there to get an apartment. Being young and black probably didn't help us any either."

"She was a really good mana-ger," said tenant Geoffrey Andersen, 27. "If there was a plumbing problem, she'd get on the maintenance guy. … She took the whole building very seriously."

But her demeanor intimidated some. In her black outfits, black lipstick and parasol, she often talked — with a laugh and flourish — about having been raped or about her occasional work in the sex industry, Andersen recalled.

"If you were friendly, her attention to you became oppressive," he said. "If you ignored her, she was hostile."

Tensions with Roemer and Lewis flared, court filings show. Mary Jesus contended that she bore the brunt of their anger when another tenant called code inspectors.

By her account, Roemer pressed her to offer money to induce an elderly tenant to move out — freeing the unit for a rent increase. Mary Jesus told tenants that the landlords were "evil."

In July 2000, court records indicate, she was taken to the Alameda County Medical Center's psychiatric facility.

The following May, Roemer and Lewis notified her that her tenure as manager was over. She could keep her apartment but would be expected to pay rent of $599.50 a month.

Roemer and Lewis did not respond to requests for an interview.

Mary Jesus applied for and began receiving food stamps and $336 in monthly general assistance. The Alameda County checks went directly to her landlords. Increasingly anxious about leaving home, she earned the rest of her rent money by working as a phone-sex provider from her apartment.

Mary Jesus complained to the owners that she could not obtain rental receipts or locate the new manager to pay. Sometimes, money orders were cashed, she documented in court filings, yet she was notified that her payments had not been received. She complained about junk in the hallways and broken mailboxes.

Mary Jesus often burned incense in her bathroom, triggering the fire alarm — some believed intentionally. The mana-ger encouraged tenants to file police reports against her after incidents of verbal abuse.

"I could tolerate Mary Jesus, but I can't say she was a good presence in the building," Andersen said. "I was always surprised there wasn't some way to get rid of such a disruptive tenant."

Cuts off Medi-Cal process

She needed Medi-Cal coverage to pay for the mental health care that she required. But she could receive Medi-Cal benefits only if she qualified for federal Supplemental Security Income, or SSI.

Kimberly Satterfield, a county social worker who helps clients obtain SSI, tried to assist. She arranged for psychologist Jeremy Coles to evaluate Mary Jesus. Coles noted numerous problems, including borderline personality disorder. But SSI is difficult to obtain, Coles said, and such a diagnosis would not guarantee it. Mary Jesus chose not to undertake the grueling process.

Satterfield bent the rules to keep seeing Mary Jesus. She scrounged up vouchers for a gym — the closest thing to therapy that the county could offer.

"She comes in completely dressed in black, with black gloves and sunglasses, and a jacket on that says 'Kill Christ,' and then she wonders why people are offended," Satterfield said. "It's like, 'Mary, well hello!'"

Then Satterfield was transferred to another unit. She last saw Mary Jesus in August 2003, when she took the witness stand in a small claims case that Mary Jesus had brought against Roe-mer. A month earlier, Mary Jesus beat an eviction attempt by proving to a jury that her landlords had grossly miscalculated what she owed in back rent. Now she was suing for "intentional emotional distress." She lost.

"Homelessness," Satterfield said, "was her greatest fear."

In late 2003 and early 2004, the landlords twice attempted to raise Mary Jesus' rent. She successfully fought both increases before Oakland's Rent Adjustment Program, arguing that she had not been given legal notice.

But in early 2004, a hearing officer inaccurately concluded that Mary Jesus was ahead in her rent. So she took the liberty of paying less.

For the first time in years, she bought a pair of shoes that cost more than $10 — black pumps with spiked silver heels. By the time the officer corrected his mistake, she was in arrears.

The rent board backed her again, ruling that she had fallen behind inadvertently. Even so, Mary Jesus owed her landlords $1,018.77. That was "just cause" for removing her.

In August, Roemer and Lewis filed another eviction action against her in Alameda County Superior Court.

On Sept. 28, she pinned a new $5 hairpiece to her bangs, donned a black velvet pantsuit and presented her defense in the eviction action. But she was far enough behind in her rent that the judge ruled against her. The eviction was set for Oct. 7.

Eviction put off for 60 days

Mary Jesus was in her final stretch.

"I will be homeless because I have nowhere else to live," she wrote in an Oct. 5 motion seeking a delay in the eviction. tower, climbed the railing and tossed the notes. A crowd of 200people gathered.

In negotiations with police and fire personnel, Mary Jesus at times moved away from the ledge and appeared to relax, witnesses said. Then she would scoot to the edge, prompting screams from onlookers.

After more than half an hour on the ledge, Mary Jesus' breathing quickened, and she plunged off the edge.

Advocates for the disenfranchised have taken up Mary Jesus' story in search of a larger message. They point to a dearth of affordable housing and a legal system skewed against the poor, noting that for $1,018.77, Mary Jesus' death might have been averted.

"The suicide of Mary Jesus is a prophetic warning of what Mohandas Gandhi once declared," wrote Terry Messman, editor of Street Spirit, an American Friends Service Committee publication distributed by homeless people. "Poverty is the worst form of violence."


http://www.modbee.com/local/story/10883473p-11656601c.html