Stop Treating Homeless People Like Outlaws. It’s Killing Them

Maria DeSersa was 34 years old when she was found dead of a fentanyl overdose in an apartment laundry facility in Federal Way, Washington. She had been a defendant in 24 cases over the span of seven years.

Research Fellow and Program Coordinator Marsha Michaelis explores Maria’s tragic story to expose the failures of a lenient criminal justice system and what happens when we treat the addicted and the homeless like outlaws instead of providing them with the help and accountability that could set their lives on a new trajectory.

Transcript

“Babe, get up.”

Those were the last words ever spoken to Maria DeSersa. But she couldn’t get up. She lay late last March on the grimy laminate floor of an apartment laundry facility in Federal Way, her head resting against the washing machine.

Fentanyl was flooding Maria’s brain, whispering sweet nothings as it poisoned her for the last time and erased the rest of her life.

When an apartment maintenance worker responded to a report of suspicious activity, Maria’s companion told him, “She won’t get up,” and left.

It was strangers who called 911, dragged Maria out of the laundry room onto the cold cement of a narrow walkway, administered at least two doses of Narcan, and performed CPR until she was pronounced dead.

She was just two weeks shy of her 34th birthday.

Certainly, Maria made many choices that led to her lonely, untimely death. Yet Washington’s criminal justice system bears significant blame. Court records show she was the defendant in at least 24 cases in the last seven years, from eight cities and three counties.

Next to Maria’s body were foil, syringes, an unopened bottle of Narcan, a plastic container scraped clean of what appeared to be cheesy chili, and, according to the police report, “two large bags, each containing multiple purses or wallets.” It seems likely one of Maria’s last acts was to steal, almost certainly to support the addiction that killed her.

Maria’s twenty-fourth and last arraignment took place in Everett just two months before she died.

Two dozen “second chances” didn’t save her life.

Justice might have.

In the name of “compassion” (if that is the motive), Washington’s courts repeatedly denied Maria the safety and corrective intervention of the law. Clearly ensnared by fentanyl, one of the most deadly and merciless drugs ever to hit the streets, she was desperate to feed her addiction by any means, and too impaired by it to muster the will to overcome.

Maria likely left many victims — robbed of wallets, identification, treasured keepsakes, and peace of mind.

Releasing Maria, over and over, was a lot like sending a drunk driver on his way with a warning and a chuck under the chin. Maria was for years a constant, proven danger to herself and others.

Washington’s criminal justice system should have given her a real chance. It should have done its duty, leveraging justice to separate Maria from her victims, yes, but also from the streets, the violence, the craving, the drugs, the crime. Maria was a perpetrator, and undoubtedly also a victim many times over.

To claim that enforcing the law in cases like Maria’s “criminalizes homelessness” is cruelly backwards. Because, by placing Maria above the law and its correction, she was also shoved beneath the law and its protection.

We used to have a name for people in that condition: outlaws.

Despite the legends, being “outlawed” was among the harshest punishments imaginable. It meant being placed, literally, outside the law. Having defied its constraints, a person forfeited its protections. The judgment was known as caput lupinum: “Let his be a wolf’s head.” He could be hunted like a wolf, with no legal recourse.

The first recorded outlaw, Cain, famously lamented his fate: “My punishment is greater than I can bear! I will be a fugitive, and whoever finds me will kill me!”

Appropriate laws are life-giving. They restrain, because we need restraint. They protect, because we need protection. When the law faithfully serves these purposes, it does something remarkable — in G.K. Chesterton’s memorable words, it “makes space for good things to run wild.”

People experiencing homelessness are as deserving of both the protections and restraints of the law as anyone else.

Maria DeSersa — a pretty young woman with the signature dark hair, dark eyes, and high cheekbones of her Sioux people — deserved both, too, but got neither.