Homeless Encampment Disbanded

At 4:40 p.m. Thursday, David Sadler, the last homeless camper left in the woods off I‑91, wheeled containers down an embankment to the Toyota belonging to a friend, Charlie Lang. And a long-running homeless encampment was no more.

Earlier Thursday, a city crew had come to remove tents and tarps from the two clearings in the area off Exit 6 where up to 20 homeless people had made their homes for years.

After neighbors alerted the city about safety hazards there, officials have spent a week helping most of the campers temporary new housing and link to medical care and help finding longer-term lodgings. They told the campers they would have to leave by this Thursday. Three couples held out to the bitter cold end.

“The tents and tarps were removed earlier today and the clean [up] will occur next week,” reported city homeless services coordinator Velma George.

That was the morning. Around 4:15 a small rented van, parked on the dirt near the Willow on-ramp, was loading stuff belonging to various of the camp’s residents.

Ross Lawson, who was walking up the onramp to join his partner Katie on the sidewalk bridge, reported that officials had arrived at around 2. ​“About 18 police officers, some in unmarked cars, and LCI,” the Livable City Initiative neighborhoods anti-blight agency. Lawson said the van, which had just left, belonged to an activist friend of someone at LCI, and was carting stuff to private storage.

“They bulldozed it. Anything we couldn’t bring was bulldozed. Anything I couldn’t carry was left,” he said.

A quick walk-through of the site revealed no signs of ​“bulldozing,” although all the tents, windbreaks, and lean-tos were down.

Katie Lawson was in tears as she waited for Ross. ​“I have no place to go and it’ll be subzero tonight,” she said.

Sadler was the last person left. His friend Lang has been checking up on Sadler for the last weeks, ever since news of eviction had been announced,. He said he was going to bring Sadler and Sadler’s wife Taty’s stuff to Sadler’s storage facility on Dixwell Avenue in Hamden.

Sadler said he wasn’t sure where he was going to go Thursday night, although Lang said he expected Sadler, whom he knows through a mutual acquaintance that Sadler had befriended years ago, to be at the Goffee Street warming center. As a deep freeze sets in, the city has activated warming centers among other emergency steps to keep people safe.

Sadler and Lang were still loading as the sun set and you could see that the former residents had left what they couldn’t carry — - including strollers. A pretty good looking bicycle was chained to a tree.

Earlier Thursday, Richard and Lora Weeks shivered as they awaited assistance, because they had already dismantled their propane gas set-up that had provided some warmth. They also had removed some parts of the pup tent they sleep in, set up within a big flapping windbreak Weeks had built, in order to have that stuff ready to be moved to a secure location. Weeks has had bad experiences, he said, of his stuff being ransacked or stolen, and he was adamant about securing it.

As they waited for clarification if the city had found some place to shelter them together, as a couple, and if the belongings could be secured beforehand, a new problem arrived Thursday morning: arctic winds that blasted at them off the Mill River and snow flurries blowing across the encampment.

The couples had expected vehicles to arrive early in the morning, but none were there. The only new arrival was blasts of bitter cold weather.

Lora Weeks’s fingers were visibly shaking when her phone rang.

It was homeless advocate Jesse Hardy telling her that he and another advocate for their situation, were at City Hall trying to negotiate a stay of the eviction with the mayor and other officials. (In the end, there was no stay.)

He said if someone shows up, tell them an injunction is in the works, Lora Weeks reported on the conversation.

Weeks hugged her friend Katie Lawson.

“Could I go for a hot chocolate?” said Lora Weeks. Katie Lawson said she could go for a coffee.

The security of his belongings was paramount on Richard Weeks’ mind. No matter how tough the weather, he said he would not leave the stuff — contained within several suitcases, some portable shelves with personal items — unguarded. The two couples talked among themselves about which warming center to go to, if it came to that.

They decided on the one at the Bethel A.M.E. Church on Goffe Street. Richard Weeks had plenty of experience with the place, he said. Get there tonight by 8:30 ​“and go straight for the coffee pot,” he advised.

Following is an earlier version of this story:

Homeless Holdouts Await Eviction

Richard and Lora Weeks, a couple married for 28 years, have considered an encampment in the woods along the Mill River by the Willow Street I‑91 off-ramps ​“home” for the past two years — but appear to have only one more night left there.

After spending more than a week finding indoor shelter for most of the encampment’s 15 – 20 people and connecting them to health care, the city — fearing that people might freeze to death and concerned about safety risks — plans to raze the tents Thursday and order any holdouts to sleep elsewhere.

Only Weeks and about a half-dozen others are holding out, including another couple, David Sadler and his girlfriend ​“Taty.”

The action to remove the encampment’s accumulation of trash and help campers deal with their problems came last week after complaints from neighbors.

In a tour Wednesday of the the site —which includes ​“camp one” closer to the I‑91 ramps; and ​“camp two,” a little farther into the woods — it was clear that the majority of the tents had been abandoned.

Taty, who did not want to give her real name, pointed to a tent that had belonged to a pregnant woman who had been relocated; and to another tent that belonged to two people, users of methadone, who had been relocated to facilities to address their addiction problem.

Neither of the two remaining couples — the Weekes and David Sadler and Taty — had specific plans of where they might be sleeping Wednesday night, after the planned razing of the encampment.

Sadler, 54 years old, and Taty, 31, both described themselves as autistic. They said they had been in touch with a number of people from homeless services, but the autism is such, in Sadler’s case, he said, that he can’t remember from one day to the next whom to deal with.

“My plans are to go to East Rock or Sleeping Giant to camp. What else do I have to do?” he said.

The couple, who had been living together at the Daggett Street lofts until officials shut down the illegal apartments there over safety concerns, said they want to stay together to help take care of each other. (They can’t do that at shelters.) If the city came today and offered him an apartment, he’d take it, Sadler said. He pronounced the prospect ​“awesome,” in fact, because ​“I want to stay with the woman I want to marry, and I can’t marry her without an address. Then she could get disability and we could afford an apartment.”

Sadler receives $800 in social security disability. He said a third of that goes to cover storage of his stuff — he’s a jewelry maker — in a rented locker in Hamden.

There was a lot of stuff left in the large tent, dubbed ​“The Fairie Fortress,” that he and Taty have been sharing with another couple, who have since vacated.

“He’s a hoarder,” Taty said.

“I’m not a hoarder. I’m an artist,” Sadler replied as he slowly chose a shirt and several necklaces and emerged from a pup tent within the lean-to or windbreak, which was the ​“Fairie Fortress.”

“It takes me ten times longer to do things than another person,” he said.

Taty said she was a highly trained gymnast in her native Chile and hopes to coach the sport when her life get settled. She said she needs to stay with David to take care of him.

In the middle of their ramshackle tent, set up with tables, battery-powered lights, and baskets of apples and health bars alongside ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts, she had neatly piled several boxes.

“My mother is going to pick up my stuff [today] and give me a closet” to put it in, she said.

“I could live with them, but I want to stay with David and take care of him. And my father says he [David] can’t live with us. I have a severely autistic sister.”

Coupledom was also the heart of relocation challenges for Richard and Lora Weeks over in camp one, closer to the off-ramp and hidden by a berm from the river and beyond that the Mitchell-Willow Street parking lot that serves nearby Wilbur Cross High School’s athletic facilities.

Weeks said he and his wife will be extremely unhappy to leave if the alternative is shelter. He said he will not let his wife go to shelter, which would have no facilities for married couples.

“I helped put all these tents up, made a makeshift wall against the wind,” he said, motioning to the flapping blue remnants of tent canvas caught in the branches of the trees.

Sadler said he learned his camping skills as a Boy Scout. Richard Weeks learned his from growing up in a hunting and fishing family. Lora Weeks described the encampment as a ​“commune,” and there was an undeniable camaraderie among the folks, tinged by a sense of impending loss.

The Weekses lost their last apartment in Ansonia five years ago, Richard said, when they were thrown out for not keeping up with the rent.

He said he receives $733 a month in Social Security/SSI due to a partial disability. ​“Most landlords want $600 and up” for a small space, he said, and so it’s easy to fall behind in rent and then eviction follows.

“I’m not letting her alone in a shelter,” Rich said.

“We stay together. I won’t leave him,” said Lora.

“In a shelter you get groped. She’s not going into a shelter.”

Last winter Weeks said he and Lora stayed warm mainly by walking from store to store, establishment to establishment. ​“Even when I bought a product and we stayed to stay warm,” they eventually kicked us out.

“They should have more shelters for married couples. We’ve been married for 28 years. People get pregnant or claim cancer to get housing. They’re the ones who make it bad for us,” he added.

Sadler and Taty and the Weekes and a few others interviewed Wednesday were fairly well resigned that they would be moving on, destination at least for these couples still unknown.