Wardo

Last week I wrote about my life-changing leap into direct services with people experiencing homelessness.

I’ve stayed in this world since 2015 and I’ve seen and done things I didn’t think were possible for me. Like cleaning hundreds of toilets and shower stalls for one, or working outside in 105º heat (or in the cold and rain) for days back-to-back serving our guests. I’ve gotten sick a few times, even spending a week in isolation being treated for multiple bacterial infections, but no matter what this line of work has thrown at me, I’ve always been eager to get back to work.

Most importantly, I’ve learned, as my favorite unattributed quote states,

“to honor people for what they’ve endured rather than judge them for how they appear.”

If I was religious I’d say I was constantly surrounded by angels. Wim Wenders-style angels.

And from all of this I’ve been changed. I’ve been shown my own racism, prejudices, and assumptions and come out the other side different, more tolerant, joyful, loving. I’ve learned to listen without thinking I need to fix anything.

I have lived more in these past 8 years than in all the years leading up to them.

But nothing prepared me for this:

Last spring, on one of those 105º days in MacArthur Park, near the heart of LA, one of the hoses on our trailer’s ADA chair lift failed. It popped, spraying hydraulic fluid everywhere and the chair lift dropped to the ground sending a plume of fine dust, soot mostly, everywhere to mix with our sweat.

‘Wardo’ was working a few yards away cleaning toilets for one of our sister organizations and came over to see if we needed a hand. He helped us raise the chairlift enough to move the trailer (we were anchored with hydraulic force) and went back to his work.

Over the next few weeks he spent more and more time with us. The whole team like him so much I ended up offering him a job.

He was great with our guests. Funny, kind, gracious—and he was a worker. Everything around the trailer was buffed and cleaned.

As we got to know each other, sharing the stories that brought us both to MacArthur Park, doing laundry and providing showers for our guests, we found out we had a lot in common. Enough that we quickly became friends.

Watching his life unravel over the next few months was terrible, painful. I knew about the drug use and violence he was going through at home, but he started showing up late for work and once things started snowballing I eventually had to let him go. A decision I have questioned 100 times.

Our friendship continued, we texted every few days, and he asked me for his job back every time until the day his texts stopped.

It was Friday, July 28 when he disappeared.

I was sure he’d started using again because his texts had become less frequent, more erratic, more frantic, and painful. I was sure he would write as soon as he surfaced again.

The following Monday I got the news from his childhood sweetheart, a woman he had been courting again since he got out of jail, that he had been killed. My heart broke apart. I was standing in MacArthur Park in that heat, stunned. I kept looking at the texts in disbelief as she wrote that she didn’t know any more but she’d be in touch.

I told my team the news. We cried for a minute and then went back to work. I stayed in shock for hours, though, maybe even days.

A week or so after his death my grief exploded and turned to anger. I couldn’t imagine the Wardo I knew coming to such a terrible end. I couldn’t make sense of it. It didn’t add up. Frustrated, I searched online and read the police report and the coroner’s report trying to make sense of it. I got even angrier by the offhand way the coroner had concluded his death was “accidental” without bothering to explain the two holes in his body that “were not fatal.”

Two holes…

Wardo had been in a gang since he was twelve. His family was in disarray and the local gang took him in. It was the closest thing to being loved he had ever known. He committed his first murder, at 13, to prove to the gang he was worthy of staying. His second murder, at 15, was in self-defense. The fifteen years he received for crimes he committed as a young adult were nothing compared to those of his childhood.

I know I’m about to lose a bunch of you who want to dismiss Wardo for what he did. I get it, seeing the worth in someone who’s fallen so far isn’t easy. I hope you’ll read on, however, and consider just how tortured he was by what he’d done. He told me he was sure he was going to hell, and I told him I didn’t believe in hell, for whatever that was worth. That hell was here. That he and I touched people who were living in hell every day and that he had already been there. That, more than anything, seemed to bring him some relief. 

He left the gang when he was released from prison and was afraid of what that might mean for his family. He lived in fear that his mother and brother were in danger as well, but after 6 months he had started to believe maybe they would just let him go.

Two holes…

His death was violent and terrible. Wardo once told me what he had seen happen to people who tried to leave the gang. The torture, brutality, and violence that was so casually meted out to anyone who strayed. The violation of their bodies as the final humiliation before their life ended. This is what he feared would happen to him. When I saw the words “two holes” in the coroner’s report I grieved for what he must have endured. The coroner’s report said they weren’t bullet holes or stab wounds. The holes themselves did not kill him. It took three cars to do that.

Two holes…

Wardo was dumped in a busy intersection, still alive, where he was run over by several cars in quick succession, only the last car stopped to see what he’d hit. That kind driver stayed with Wardo’s body until the police arrived.

Wardo’s body was so badly mangled that it took two days for him to be identified. That the coroner bothered to report those two holes says something about how they stood out; even if his death was officially “accidental”—that tiny detail was still noted.

Wardo love to tell jokes and always greeted our guests with a laugh and a clean towel. He was so hopeful, so grateful to be out of prison and starting his life over. He was one of the kindest, happiest, funniest, hopeful and helpful people I have ever known.

He was thirty-three.

The story of those two holes still eats at me and I’m trying to accept that I will never know and that I need to find peace with that. But the cognitive dissonance created in that process, the heat of it, the pain, drives me to take action. In the very beginning, it threatened to consume me and over the months of August and September I wrote furiously, angrily, thousands of words, tens of thousands of words in response to Wardo’s death. Screeds against senseless violence and the loss of my friend.

Even as the pain has subsided after that great outpouring of grief, the heat has increased. Telling his story is the only way I’ve found to not be consumed by it.

And I’m telling Wardo’s story because he no longer can, because everyone deserves to be remembered for the best of themselves and not the worst. 

You would have loved him, trust me.