by Travis Mateer
The title of this post is the question I’m asking myself after reading this piece of Poverello propaganda from the Montana Free Press. Here’s the excerpt that has me asking if I helped the man who broke his hip so he could be murdered by a homeless psychopath (emphasis mine):
The organization’s Homeless Outreach Team — which has grown from one to five people since 2011 — builds relationships with people living on the street and provides food, gear, support and connection to services. The team also works with businesses to help them understand the issues and better interact with unhoused people.
About five years ago, the team found a man who broke his hip by the river and got him to medical treatment, Border Patton said.
“They’re kind of the only ones going out to these camps and making sure folks are OK,” she said. “Just checking in with them, having relationships has been really good.”
Yes, that ONE PERSON who started the H.O.T. program in 2011 was me, and after working my ass off to establish a credible program, I left my position in 2016, so I’m not sure if the homeless man with a broken hip, who was found and helped by my former program, was Lee Nelson, the homeless man brutally murdered in November of 2020 by Charles Covey.
Lee Nelson had a broken hip and needed massive amounts of help to recover from his injuries, which I believe he sustained from a drunken fall. He was living under an overpass near East Missoula at the time, so maybe the article I’m quoting from is referring to a different homeless person with a broken hip.
Some of the successes I used to reference when I was working at the shelter included how I connected some very difficult clients to family OUTSIDE of Missoula. One guy, Duane, came to the shelter from prison and required significantly more medical care than the shelter could provide, but after getting kicked out of EVERY nursing home in Missoula, he was left to drink and shit himself in the streets.
The last nursing home I got Duane into lasted only a few days because Duane quickly broke rules by accessing porn on the computer, then he removed his adult diaper and shit directly in the bed as an act of protest. When Duane was dropped off back at the shelter, where we refused to let him back in, a community member almost got in a fight with me as I tried explaining, without violating HIPPA, that some clients just can’t be served safely in our shelter facility.
When I found a family member in Helena willing to let Duane stay with him, I sprang into action, got Duane cleaned up, found funding for a bus ticket, and physically put him on that bus and verified it left the station with him on it. When I reported this relocation success to staff at St. Pat’s ER, I received a standing ovation.
Another “frequent flier” of emergency services maintained he came to Missoula to “retire”, but really he was just drinking himself to death at a camp down the Kim Williams trail. The more I got to know him, the more he would share about his life, so when I discovered he had a sister in Florida, and I finally convinced him to give me her number, I called and found out this “homeless” man had a condo he could stay at because his name was on the lease.
After setting up this guy for a long bus ride east, which included little bottles of vodka for the DTs he would start experiencing WITHOUT booze, I got a call from a brother who wasn’t happy his alcoholic bro had returned home. Tough shit, I thought, but on the phone I said to this angry family member that Montana simply didn’t have the resources to help him.
That was before 2017, when this happened:
In 2017, the Legislature cut $49 million from the Department of Health and Human Services’ budget, leading to the loss of a wide range of medical and behavioral health services across the state, according to Montana Public Radio. That included roughly halving the Medicaid reimbursement for case management, which helps coordinate services for an individual’s specific needs, KFF Health News reported.
As those services declined, more people showed up at the Pov needing additional support to maintain housing, Border Patton said. That included one woman who would lose her house key daily and previously had a case manager who would keep an extra key to let her in. After losing that support, that woman couldn’t keep her apartment on her own.
“There’s dozens of anecdotes like that,” Border Patton said. “If somebody just had a little bit of help they could be successfully housed, but without anything, those people are just left out in the cold.”
Yes, they’re left out in the cold, and sometimes they bang on doors and grab the little girl who answers the door, like Lorenna did last month.
Below is a brief interview I did with Lorenna in 2022 after she got into housing, but didn’t have a case manager to help her MAINTAIN housing. Is that why she got back into a crazy, desperate situation that has negative ripple effects in our community when her behavior threatens a little girl?
Tomorrow at Western Montana News my weekly article will continue providing insights into reality of living marginally in Missoula, but from the perspective of now BEING someone without a conventional home. If you’d like to throw some dollars at my digital panhandling effort, Travis’ Impact Fund (TIF) is the place to do it.
Thanks for reading!
I was a friend of Lee Nelson. He hadn’t been homeless very long. He had an apartment out on East Broadway, but he gave it up and became homeless because he was accused of causing a fruit fly outbreak! Lee was a very kind and gentle man. I imagine he was either very embarrassed or more likely, deeply hurt by the accusation. He would call me from his camp along the interstate, asking me to take him to Walmart or wherever, and he was always chipper, he didn’t mind being homeless, he loved life. He was only hanging around the poverello because he was injured, he was a good friend.