Outreach worker: We need ‘right resources’ for homeless camp near Seattle school

Broadview Thomson K-8 went on lockdown again earlier this week after a construction worker saw someone inside that he didn’t think should be in the school. The Jason Rantz Show on KTTH heard from someone on the ground who said a staff member there indicated that it might have been someone from the nearby homeless encampment, but Seattle police have neither commented on the situation nor officially confirmed it.

Aside from that incident and a separate lockdown in April, the large encampment remains just steps away from the school campus in north Seattle, which the school board refuses to remove.

Rantz: School board members demanded Seattle not sweep homeless encampments from schools

There was also recently an overdose at the encampment, though thankfully the man survived. Andrea Suarez, founder of We Heart Seattle, a citizen funded coalition that’s helping the local homeless population, was at the camp as the overdose happened and was the person who called 911.

“It was really traumatizing,” Suarez said. “I was actually out at Bitter Lake … doing a boots on the ground outreach effort that I’ve been continuing to do there over the last few weeks. And a gentlemen I was actually looking for was presumably passed out on the ground, taking a nap. And I was like, ‘oh, you know, didn’t want to bother him.'”

When she circled back around, he was still there, which is when she says a couple of other folks from the camp showed up with Narcan.

“Then I started to get actually quite concerned what was going on,” she said, realizing it was an overdose.

“I kept my distance and hadn’t reached for my phone yet until I heard ‘he’s choking, he’s turning blue,’ and that’s when I turned, I grabbed my phone, called 911 — at the risk of being of course demonized for calling 911 on a homeless person, but what to do? And said somebody’s having an overdose and they took my phone over to the folks that were pumping this person’s chest and we had them on speaker and the person on the phone helped them through CPR until the medics showed up,” Suarez said. “It was very traumatizing to see actually, everybody was hysterical.”

The man is alive, Suarez said.

“The paramedics came, gave him oxygen, took details on how much Narcan he had been provided, and within not even a minute or two later he was able to sit up and was just disorientated,” she said. “It was a miracle to watch, frankly. I mean, I literally was like this person is going to die in front of me.”

Local dad says he wants homeless encampment near school gone

Her worry about this camp by the school is that more people are at risk of dying.

“I see people living in unsanitary conditions. No place to, you know. King County has actually showed up twice with staff handing out sharps containers, clean needles, picking up dirty needles on school grounds,” she said. “And I’m shocked to say, … how are we allowing this to happen and allowing people, in my opinion, to slowly die rather than empowering them to make a decision to live. By letting people camp there without the right resources in unsanctioned, un-serviced grounds, on school grounds, is nothing short, in my opinion, of a slow form of suicide that we’re allowing as a community, as a city, as leaders.”

Suarez says We Heart Seattle is always in need of more help. She suggests walking through the encampments, asking how people are doing and what services they need.

“Surprisingly — I’m just one person — but there’s not ever one day that I don’t walk into an encampment and somebody comes out of their tent and says, ‘I want detox,’ ‘I want a job,’ ‘I want a ride home,’ ‘help me.’ They are in need of help,” she said. “And we as a community can have more boots on the ground, so I do need more volunteers.”

“Ask how can I help and get your boots out on the ground and start asking how you can help your people living around you in unsanitary, unhealthy conditions,” she added. “Everybody can do this work.”

Listen to the Jason Rantz Show weekday afternoons from 3 – 6 p.m. on KTTH 770 AM (or HD Radio 97.3 FM HD-Channel 3). Subscribe to the podcast here.