Markeshia Ricks Photo
Kate holding a picture of her late father.
Seventy-one year old Kate was back in her Beaver Hills home after a concerned neighbor and city officials orchestrated her rescue from clutter that pinned her to a couch.
That rescue occurred two weeks ago. It was sparked by a chance follow-up to a report from a neighbor of possible hoarding, sent to the city’ fire investigator’s office.
Kate’s cleared dining room leading into the kitchen.
Fire Investigator Ray Saracco said his crew had checked out the complaint a week prior to his deciding to follow up. They found an extremely cluttered home, but no Kate in sight.
Saracco said because no one was found inside and in danger, the investigators closed the complaint. But for some unknown reason they put the complaint in his mailbox. So two weeks ago he decided that he would go check out the house personally. He called Evan Trachten and Jeff Moreno of New Haven government’s neighborhoods anti-blight agency, the Livable City Initiative, to accompany him.
The men have been teaming up on housing and fire code violations in the city as part of an effort to make sure that landlords keep their properties blight-free and safe. But this call was different.
When they arrived at Kate’s house two weeks ago, she was home. The men could hear the classical music that Kate favors from outside her front door.
They knocked, and she called to them.
At first, she told them to go away. They told her that they were from the city, and that a neighbor who had been checking in on her from time to time had sent them out of concern.
The red couch, a family heirloom, where Kate was confined, now cleared.
Kate was on the couch in her living room. She couldn’t come to the door to let them in. She’d had a stroke back in December and wasn’t moving around very well. She told them to come around back, where she directed them how to get inside.
“I’ve been doing this for 15 years, and I’d never seen one like this,” Trachten said. The men were stunned at what they found.
Kate’s house was so packed to the brim with her life’s belongings that they could barely get in. It was also filthy, because she’d been on her couch for some time, unable to get to the bathroom or to take out the trash.
The kitchen before.
“The smell was unbelievable,” Saracco said. They knew they had to get Kate out of the house, but they couldn’t force her. Nor could she leave under her own will, because of her condition.
What about my belongings? Kate asked. She couldn’t leave them unattended.
The neighbor, a city employee who asked to remain anonymous, helped out. He convinced Kate that he would watch her home, get it cleaned up and make sure that only garbage went into the trash. She said OK.
Emergency personnel had to put on hazmat suits to get her out of the house and transport her to Yale-New Haven Hospital. She returned home a week ago.
“I Don’t Want To Be Treated Like Garbage”
The kitchen after.
On Thursday, for the first time in a long time, Kate was able to host four people simultaneously in her kitchen, which was sporting new flooring, white cabinets, a new refrigerator and stove. The concerned neighbor had undertaken the clean up-personally. She’d been home almost a week.
Kate, who asked not to be identified by her last name, said she has lived in her Beaver Hills home for 36 years. The former English literature and music teacher lives there alone among what she calls her many “artifacts.”
A young Kate with her grandmother.
Passageways are now cleared for walking through the house. Nearly every surface in her house remains covered with hand-carved collectables that are clearly not from this century. A pepper grinder box with a handle churn sits atop a large antique cabinet along with a multitude of small statues and curios.There’s a small library of sorts in the back of the house. The dining room has a cleaned-off table; boxes line the walls and are stacked to the ceiling. The house has an upstairs, but Kate, who uses a walker, can’t navigate the stairs.
One could more easily walk through the kitchen to the living room. Kate’s beloved piano sits there at one end, covered in pictures of her father, her mother, grandmother and a beloved bunny rabbit, and the very couch that she had been trapped on, sat at the other end, so clean it looked new.
Three of the people who came to visit were among the men who have taken Kate, who has no living family, under their wings while trying to figure out the city’s protocol for dealing with something they’re seeing more and more of, especially when it comes to elderly people: hoarding.
LCI’s Trachten said he sees nine or ten such cases a year and the city could have condemned the house, forcing Kate to move. But that would have just left a boarded-up house on an otherwise beautiful neighborhood street.
The other factor was Kate. She didn’t want to leave her home. She is mentally competent, but clearly needs some level of daily assistance to meet her basic day-to-day needs.
“We can’t overstep,” Trachten said. “It’s tricky.”
Besides, Kate added, “I’m a professional woman. I didn’t want to be treated like garbage.”
“Any type of incident like this,” Saracco said, “we have to play by ear because there is no protocol.”
“It’s a crap shoot,” Kate said.
Left For Dead
In trying to help Kate, Trachten and Saracco reached out to the state housing court and the city’s elderly services and health departments. They learned the city doesn’t have one protocol to make sure people like Kate, who don’t have family or lots of money, get what they need. The reality is that there also is no way to be sure that someone as independent as Kate would have come to the attention of the city if she didn’t have caring neighbors.
The concerned neighbor, who started getting to know Kate last year while doing some work on a nearby house, said that once he realized the state of her living conditions, he made it a point to check regularly on her. He hauls garbage for the city and starts his day at 5 a.m.; he finds time to bring her three squares every day. In December, when she had her stroke, he was the one who convinced her that she needed to go to the hospital.
Kate needed someone to clean up her front door and entryway so she could get in her house when she got home from the rehabilitation center. So she called the neighbor.
“I love that lady like she’s my grandmother,” remarked the neighbor, who said he paid for the clean-up out of his own pocket and finished the job quickly with the help of friends. “Knowing that she doesn’t have anybody, I just did the best that I could do.”
Saracco pointed out that if Kate hadn’t agreed to the help she received, there was no telling how things would have ended up. The city might have had to start a condemnation procedure. Or Kate could have been seriously hurt.
“This really is just the best possible outcome,” Saracco said.
Moreno, Saracco and Trachten.
Trachten said they discovered that after Kate’s stroke and a two-month stint in a rehabilitation center in Orange, she was released home. She had a visiting nurse, who Kate said visited once and never returned.
The neighbor said there should be some type of hotline for people to call, particularly elderly people, to get help. He said if he hadn’t convinced Kate to go the hospital in December, he’s not sure she’d still be alive to be rescued from her house in February.
“The thing that kills me the most is that the home nurse walked in and walked out,” he said. “The nurse didn’t contact me and my number is on the front door. She just left her there for dead.”
The men said Kate’s case touched them. They approached it the same as they would if she were their mother or aunt. They even visited her in the hospital.
“We wanted to show respect and make sure that Kate was happy with the outcome,” Trachten said.
Kate was.
“I thank God for them,” she said with tears in her eyes. “It’s better than it was before. I appreciate it. How can I not?”