Through The Cracks - Episode 3 - Kicked Out (Transcript)
Through The Cracks - Episode 3 - Kicked Out (Transcript)
Through The Cracks - Episode 3 - Kicked Out (Transcript)
Jonquilyn Hill: I 'm Jonquilyn Hill and from WAMU PRX, this is Through The Cracks, a
podcast about the gaps in our society and the people who fall through them.
Relisha Rudd: R
-E-L-I-S-H-A.
Jonquilyn Hill: T
his season on Through The Cracks, we're investigating the
disappearance of Relisha Rudd. Relisha disappeared when she was eight years old
while her family was living in a homeless shelter in southeast D.C. It took 18 days for
anyone to realize she was missing.
We'll look at the world Relisha grew up in. Her school, the shelter where she lived,
her family.
Antonio Wheeler: When I was a kid, I was quiet. I hid a lot of stuff in. And that's
another reason why I'm always angry, because I held a lot of my childhood feelings
in, too.
Jonquilyn Hill: W
e're going back to the months and even years before Relisha went
missing to determine if her disappearance was really, as the city claimed,
unpreventable.
Jonquilyn Hill: Y
eah.
Patrick Madden: E
veryone and no one wanted to take responsibility for this.
Jonquilyn Hill: O
n today's episode: Eviction. The eviction that unhoused Relisha's
family.
Jonquilyn Hill: I wanted to find out how Relisha ended up in a shelter with her
family. So I met up with Relisha's stepdad Antonio Wheeler on a hot summer day.
We went to Oxon Run Park in southeast D.C. It's near the place he's sharing with his
brother now. It was right after Labor Day weekend, so the garbage cans near a picnic
table were stuffed to the brim and beyond with trash from the weekend's cookouts.
Someone even left a grill behind.
Back in 2012, Antonio, his then fiancee, Shamika, Relisha, and her three little brothers
lived in an apartment on Brandywine Street in Congress Heights, a nearby
neighborhood.
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Antonio Wheeler: When I was a kid, I lived on Brandywine too. The same street, in
the same building, but just upstairs.
Jonquilyn Hill: I walked around this neighborhood. Brandywine Street is lined with
trees and there are mostly houses with a few small apartment buildings. Nothing
super tall, maybe four stories. Relisha could have walked the four blocks to her
elementary school. Ferebee Hope.
Antonio Wheeler: Yeah, it was really spacious. It had a living room, a dining room,
and three bedrooms, and a bathroom. I let her draw on her walls in her way
because, you know, we didn't have a lot of money to decorate it the way that we
wanted to. So we let her do at her will – "Decorate your room. Do what you want to
it. I'll just repaint it after we move or whatever.”
Jonquilyn Hill: R
elisha got her own room because she was the only girl. Antonio
remembers their year in that apartment as a happy time.
Antonio Wheeler: We had pizza night, we had cereal night, and as we called it, a
cereal date. "Kids, do you wanna have a cereal date tonight? 'Yeah, let's have a
cereal date!'" You know, we just eat cereal. All day, all night. So, like, we will all go in
the kitchen, get your own box of cereal, we sit in a circle, put the cartoons on and we
eat cereal until you couldn't eat no more.
Jonquilyn Hill: G
olden Grahams, Frosted Flakes, Captain Crunch. And then there
was Relisha's favorite.
Jonquilyn Hill: I 'm not here to defend Lucky Charms. I've always been a Golden
Grahams girl myself. But, in any case, as they were munching their cereal or eating
their pizza, Antonio says the apartment around them was falling apart.
Antonio Wheeler: Pipes in the walls started busting. So the landlord came through
and, you know, he basically tried to make us pay for the damages saying that my
son did something to the pipes. He was two at the time.
So I'm like, excuse me, sir, let me let me ask you a question, because I lay carpet too
and I do, you know, work like that. So I said, how could he bust the pipes if the pipes
in the middle of the wall to the bathroom was up on the wall right here? How can
he bust it? How could he bust that? He couldn't answer that. So I'm like, OK, so I had
old pipes in here. Just admit that I had old pipes, sir. So don't blame my kids for it.
Jonquilyn Hill: A ntonio says the landlord avoided doing a lot of repairs, so he ended
up fixing a lot of things himself.
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Antonio Wheeler: They had a furnace set in there where it developed this brick of
ice, block of ice on the side of it and the person who took care of the apartment
would always come and hit it with a hammer and a screwdriver to break the ice up.
So the sort of AC can work. So I was doing it a couple of times until one day the
system started sparking and something caught a fire. So I had to get the
extinguisher to get it out. Long story short, I told him that we wasn't paying no more
rent until you properly fixed this problem.
Jonquilyn Hill: I spoke with someone who did work in the building but who didn't
want to be identified by name. While they didn't say anything about icy furnaces or
hammers and screwdrivers, they weren't surprised by Antonio's story. This person
told me that leaks in the cooling weren't uncommon. The building wasn't in the
greatest condition. On a scale from one to 10, this person gave it a four.
D.C. tenants have the right to withhold rent until a landlord makes repairs, but when
Antonio threatened not to pay the rent, he says the landlord dropped a huge bomb
on them.
Antonio Wheeler: I didn't know since we moved in that unit, Miss Shamika Young
has not been paying the bills. Before the pipes and the AC unit started
malfunctioning, she was never paying the bills. And I would give her the money to
pay the bills; I was working at Ben and Jerry's at the time.
Jonquilyn Hill: I called the landlord. He didn't agree to go on tape, so I'm going to
summarize what he said.
Melissa Young: H er youngest son. He has real bad severe asthma. Every day on a
daily basis. Emergency room visits, emergency room visits. Kind of found out it was
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the carpet. When they instructed him to take the carpet up, that's when he put my
daughter out.
Jonquilyn Hill: T
hat's Melissa's recollection, at least. The landlord denies that it
happened this way. In any case, everyone agrees on what happened next.
I wake up that morning. I see the U.S. Marshals outside. So I tell Shamika, "didn't we
just go to court?"
Jonquilyn Hill: I n most cities, it's the sheriff who evicts people. But in D.C., we don't
have a sheriff. We have the U.S. Marshals. Once the U.S. Marshals are at your door,
there's no avoiding eviction. They can force entry legally into your home and trying
to resist can get you arrested.
Antonio Wheeler: That day was horrific. Had all my things outside. People would
come up and take our stuff. You know, I got all the important things out the way,
like the bed, our TV, the video games, the kids' toys, all that stuff wasn't outside. But
our clothes and some shoes and stuff, yeah, people was coming up, taking our
furniture, you know. I was like, go 'head, y'all saving me money for not putting it in
storage in a way, but in a sense I was mad because that's money –hard earned
money that I work for, you know. But that day was...I'm not gonna forget it.
Jonquilyn Hill: T
his eviction was a turning point in Relisha's life. Up 'til now, her
family had a place to live and the stability that comes from having a permanent
address. But eviction can have dramatic consequences for individuals and for
families.
Matthew Desmond, “Evicted”: I'm now convinced that eviction is a cause, not just
a condition of poverty. It makes things worse.
Jonquilyn Hill: M
atthew Desmond is a sociologist and author of "Evicted: Poverty
and Profit in the American City." He says eviction is so traumatic, it can lead to
depression and suicide. Here he is on The Diane Rehm Show, back in 2016.
Matthew Desmond, “Evicted”: You know, people lose their communities, children
lose their schools. We have good evidence that workers often lose their jobs. And
anyone listening out there who's been through an eviction, or through foreclosure,
can I can tell you why. It's such a consuming, overwhelming, stressful event. It can
cause you to make mistakes at work and eventually lose that job.
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Jonquilyn Hill: T
he cost of losing your stuff or putting it into storage, of finding a
new place to live, can thrust people really quickly into poverty. It can take at least
two years to recover from an eviction – if you recover from it at all.
Matthew Desmond, “Evicted”: And we have evidence that mothers who were
evicted experience higher rates of depression two years later. So you add that all up,
right? And you're left with a really strong picture, how eviction is driving people
deeper into poverty and making their lives much harder.
Antonio Wheeler: My kids asking me all kinds of questions like, Daddy, are we
going to have another place to live, like where are we going to go?
Jonquilyn Hill: T
his wasn't the first time that Antonio had been through an eviction.
His family had been kicked out of their apartment when he was a kid. And according
to court documents, it wasn't Shamika's first time having issues with the landlord
either. And because eviction set the family up for so many other problems, I wanted
to know if there was anything that could have been done to prevent this eviction
from happening.
I logged on to the D.C. Court database –anyone can– and did a search for Shamika
Young. And I found out that this 2012 eviction from the apartment on Brandywine
was her fifth time in tenant court. Beyond that, though, I wasn't exactly sure what
any of these records were telling me.
Now, I'm one of about three people in D.C. who is not a lawyer. So I called Beth
Mellen Harrison. To help me decode what exactly I was seeing. She works for a
nonprofit called Legal Aid. Her clients are low-income renters who find themselves in
housing court and need legal help.
Our meeting started with the normal pandemic Zoom awkwardness. But after a
minute or two, my computer finally started cooperating and Beth was able to help
me out.
Jonquilyn Hill: Y
eah, so this is the first one, Norman Ditzen versus Shamika Young?
Jonquilyn Hill: T he first record I pulled is from January 2006. Relisha would have
been a baby, about three months old. It's for nonpayment of rent. But in the end,
Shamika wasn't evicted. The second case from 2006 got dismissed too. Shamika's
first actual eviction happened in 2008, when Relisha was two. It took about three
5
months to work through the eviction process. In the red is the order for the eviction
to happen.
Here's where D.C. eviction laws get tricky. At the time we're talking about, all
landlords had to do was give a tenant a 75-day window for their eviction. This is the
equivalent of saying the repairman is coming sometime between March and the
middle of May. So, be alert.
Renters facing eviction like Shamika had a serious calculation to make. Do they
move immediately and start paying rent in a new place or do they risk it and
continue to stay in their apartment not paying rent until the U.S. Marshal comes?
Jonquilyn Hill: C
ourt documents don't tell you everything. We can't tell, for example,
whether Shamika got out of her apartment before her landlord threw her stuff out.
That happens a lot. A tenant will know an eviction is coming and find a new home
before their stuff ends up on the curb.
There are a couple more of Shamika's court proceedings to go over. One from 2011
when Relisha was five, another eviction – Shamika's second. And then the last one
we see is from 2012, the apartment on Brandywine.
I tell Beth about the disagreement that Antonio and Melissa have over the eviction,
whether it was because of the carpet or about Shamika just not paying the rent.
Beth Mellen Harrison: W ell, I can say generally that when we talk to tenants who
are facing eviction, in any kind of case –nonpayment of rent or lease violation case–
the majority of them, the vast majority of them, have repair needs.
Jonquilyn Hill: I f your apartment needs repairs, you can use that as a defense in
tenant court. So if Shamika had a complaint about the carpet, she may have refused
to pay rent until the landlord addressed her complaint. The record shows that she
was evicted because she didn't pay rent, but it doesn't give any insight into why it
wasn't paid.
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Jonquilyn Hill: M
ostly this eviction record looks the same as the others. Shamika
doesn't show up for the first hearing. Then she asks for more time. But there is
something here that makes this record a little different.
Jonquilyn Hill: A pro bono attorney, someone like Beth. Most tenants go without any
representation in tenant court whatsoever. Shamika was taking steps to avoid
eviction. It gets at one of the questions I had for Beth: If anything more could have
been done?
Jonquilyn Hill: I t looks like she fought pretty hard for this last one in particular.
Beth Mellen Harrison: Y eah, and what I would say is, courts want these cases to be
decided on the merits. And what that means, what I mean by that, what the court
means by that is, even if a party misses a court date, doesn't do something
procedurally that they're supposed to, if they then come back in a court and say,
wait a minute, this is my home, I have things to say about this. I don't think I owe all
this money for these reasons, there was supposed to be a really heavy thumb on the
scale of letting that case have a trial.
Jonquilyn Hill: S hamika's eviction case did not go to trial. And because the public
filing doesn't show exactly what was said in court, we can't tell how much the
attorney pushed for a trial. Or for that matter, if Shamika provided evidence that the
carpet was an issue.
Beth Mellen Harrison: B ased on what you were telling me the family has said, one
of those issues would be: Did the tenant request that the carpet be changed?
Should the carpet have been changed? Were there other conditions in the home?
Especially for a child with asthma, there are any number of conditions that might
have aggravated or even caused the asthma. Was there mold? Was there
infestation? And there may have been other issues as well.
Jonquilyn Hill: O
ther issues that could have swayed a jury to decide this case in
Shamika's favor, stop the eviction and decrease the amount of money the landlord
was asking for if he hadn't made repairs.
Beth said there was one more thing Shamika may have qualified for: emergency
rent assistance, a last resort. The District budgets a certain amount of money every
year to give to people who need help with their rent in emergency situations, like
eviction. The problem is, assistance money runs out. Usually during the summertime,
about three or four months before the end of the fiscal year in September.
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Beth Mellen Harrison: T
he one kind of citywide program that's available to help
you as a tenant may not even have money left, and it's just because it's
underfunded.
Jonquilyn Hill: S hamika's landlord filed a complaint in March, but Shamika wasn't
kicked out of the apartment until the end of July. If she applied then, the fund had
likely run out.
Beth Mellen Harrison: I know you asked me, like, what more could she have done,
but I kind of want to focus instead on what more could the system do for somebody
like Ms. Young. To make sure that she doesn't fall through the cracks, to make sure
when somebody is being evicted, that we have confidence that that is...That's the
right decision or the only decision, the only outcome that is possible in this situation.
Jonquilyn Hill: M
aybe the family wouldn't have been evicted if there was more
money in the rent assistance pool. Maybe they wouldn't have been evicted if
Shamika had shown up at every court date, or maybe, if the case went to trial, the
eviction would have been canceled altogether.
Before we get back to Relisha and her family, I want to point out that D.C. has a
reputation for being a tenant-friendly city, even though it's extremely hard to find an
affordable place to live. D.C. is fairly progressive when it comes to tenants rights,
compared to other cities. If a landlord wants to sell or tear down a building, tenants
are guaranteed first dibs on the property. They can buy it before it goes on the
market. And if a landlord tries to raise rent, tenants can legally challenge that. But
neither of these situations apply to Shamika. Not everyone has the resources to take
advantage of D.C.'s tenant protections. These progressive policies weren't enough to
keep Shamika housed. No city is progressive enough to keep every person in
Shamika's situation from losing their apartment and falling through the cracks.
After the break, Relisha's family figures out where to stay after getting kicked out of
their apartment. We'll be right back.
–
Jonquilyn Hill: W
e've been working on Through The Cracks for a long time, and just
when we hit our groove, a pandemic came along. Sound familiar? For this podcast,
adapting to COVID life meant new equipment, a lot of interviews in public parks and
turning my closet into a makeshift studio. There's no way we could have changed
our plans without the generosity of our funders, including listeners just like you. You
make this kind of investigative reporting possible. And if you want to contribute
directly to Through The Cracks right now, I'd be incredibly grateful. You can donate
at WAMU.org/SupportThroughTheCracks, and thanks.
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–
Antonio Wheeler: Relisha was real smart. So Relisha asked me, Daddy, where are
we gonna go now? I said, I don't know, boo. We're gonna try to go to a family
member house until we can get our own spot. She said, OK. And then she asked me
how long we were going to be without a house, because she had her own room. She
wanted her own space. So I was like, I don't know. I don't know, daughter. I don't
know. I can't answer that.
Jonquilyn Hill: I t's difficult to piece together what happened to the family
immediately after they were evicted. At some point, Relisha lived out of a car with
her mother and at least one of her brothers. But Relisha wasn't completely detached
from her old life. The cheerleading coach at her elementary school, Shannon Smith,
took an interest in her.
Shannon Smith: I grab Relisha and brought her to the team because she was
homeless and they slept in the car. And I just grabbed her one day. I told her,
watched them and she watched and then she said, I'm ready. I said, You ready? I
said, let's go. So I did a one-on-one with her and she did great. She split, she jumped.
And every time she would do something, she'd be just so happy. It would just make
her day. Then, we came to the point where I just started changing her clothes for
her because I wanted her to look like everybody else.
We would go into the bathroom when the parents pulled up. They would pull up
here in the bathroom as soon as you come in the building, I'll take her in the
bathroom, we take our little bath there. She could dance with her new clothes, so
she fits right in with the rest of them. And you couldn't tell or nothing because she
started opening up then and she started having more friends. And then next thing
you know, she's always walking down the hall, clapping and doing her cheers. But
she stayed in line, she was never disrespectful. We never had a problem with her.
She was too sweet.
Jonquilyn Hill: F
or Antonio, the eviction triggered his own childhood trauma.
Antonio Wheeler: I mean, I've been evicted before, with my mom, as a child.
Jonquilyn Hill: A
ntonio's family was evicted from that same apartment building on
Brandywine Street. And here he was, going through the same thing with his own
kids.
Antonio Wheeler: That was another mental issue I had to deal with because I
reached out to family members for us to come stay at they house. You know, all of
them told me the same thing when I got evicted.
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Jonquilyn Hill: A ntonio's family would offer to take Antonio and the two younger
boys in, but not Shamika, Relisha or her little brother. That was just too many people.
And besides, they weren't all blood related. And me, I was a family-oriented type of
dude, so I'm not gonna leave them and let them take my kids. So, we went to stick
together. So we went to Shamika's sister's house after we got evicted. You know, we
was there for like three months. Sister Ashley.
Ashley Young: M
y sister, her kids and her baby father were staying with me in a one
bedroom. It was small, but I didn't want them in a shelter.
Jonquilyn Hill: A
shley Young is one of Shamika's younger sisters, Relisha's auntie.
Her home was known as baby bootcamp. It's possible that Shamika or Antonio tried
to find housing on their own, but if they filled out a lease application, it's likely that
the landlord would have looked up their eviction records just like I did. And seeing
Shamikas five records from tenant court would have been a red flag for some
landlords, even though not all those cases ended up in an actual eviction. Instead,
they depended on the generosity of family.
Antonio Wheeler: From there, went to Ashley's house for three months. Like I
said...Ashley's house for three months. After the three months, she put us out. It got
cold. She put us out saying my kids don't never go to sleep, we don't discipline our
kids, we don't beat our kids. And I didn't, you know, I only disciplined them when
they really, really needed it. You know, I let them be kids.
Jonquilyn Hill: A
shley says she housed them as long as she could. She was on
housing assistance and her landlord said she couldn't have that many people
staying with her for an extended period of time. Ashley says, eventually, her landlord
forced the family out of her apartment.
Antonio Wheeler: It was Shamika's idea to go to the shelter. I didn't want to go, but
she just asked because I was so sick of people kept putting this out and it was
snowing and we had kids.
Jonquilyn Hill: T
hat's next time on Through The Cracks.
Antonio Wheeler: Y'all feeding us spoiled milk and moldy food. We had to cut hot
dogs open to see if it was molded on the inside.
Lakia Barnett, DC General resident: You know, why will we have to go here? Look
at this place; it’s an old hospital. I'm just being transparent. Old hospital. And you
guys got a bunch of families in here? Like, no.
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Jamila Larson, Playtime Project: W e were constantly bumping up against the
clear reality that the children in D.C. General were not valued.
Jonquilyn Hill: T
hrough The Cracks is a production of WAMU and PRX. This podcast
was made possible in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private
corporation funded by the American people, and also the Fund for Investigative
Journalism. Patrick Fort is our producer. Ruth Tam is our digital editor. Poncie
Rutsch is our senior producer. Our editor is Curtis Fox. Mike Kidd makes this episode.
Osei Hill designed our logo. Monna Kashfi oversees all the content we make here at
WAMU. Our website is WAMU.org/ThroughTheCracks. There, you can check out a
map of key locations in Relisha's disappearance. You can also sign up for our
newsletter. So you'll be the first to know whenever we share bonus content. This
podcast would not be possible without the generosity of listeners like you. To
support the investigative reporting that powers through the cracks, give at
WAMU.org/SupportThroughTheCracks. I'm Jonquilyn Hill. We'll be back next
Thursday with another episode. Thanks for listening.
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