With her son on the streets, a mother’s heart is breaking
Like most of us, Beverly Bowers cannot drive around Everett without seeing people who are homeless, whose belongings all fit in dirty backpacks or shopping carts.
Bowers, wearing a heart pendant with a heart-shaped hole, responds personally to the misery and misery she sees on the streets. She looks more accurate than most of us. She is looking for her son.
The other day she saw him walking down Everett’s Rucker Avenue. His hair was shaggy. His loose clothing was dirty. He had no shoes.
“I lost my son,” said the 63-year-old Everett woman.
At 25, her son showed signs of mental illness by the age of 18, she said. Bowers and her daughter Lea Alejandro, the young man’s older sister, sat down Thursday to share their heartbreak.
Around the time he graduated from Marysville Arts & Technology High School in 2014, he appeared to be losing interest in life. “You would talk to him, he wasn’t there, not present, he broke up,” said Alejandro, now 42.
His mother remembered the cool time when he sat on the floor of his bedroom talking to himself in bizarre ways. His sister said he would be banned from his picture in a mirror.
An extremely disturbing incident, the killing of a kitten, resulted in his being thrown out of Bowers’ Everett house. She called the police, they said, and he was taken to the Snohomish County Triage Center at the Compass Health facility on Broadway. For the first time, he spent two weeks at Compass Health.
She and Alejandro said Bowers’ son has been “officially homeless” since 2017 after long stays in behavioral health facilities, breaking the law, having family members paid to rent him a room, and failing to take required medication. His charges include criminal offenses and possession of a hidden weapon, a knife.
A teenage photo of Beverly Bowers’ son. (Olivia Vanni / The Herald)
Alejandro said she and her husband used Everett’s municipal trespassing ordinance to help them call the police. However, her brother has repeatedly turned up at their home, where they are raising two young daughters. He urinated on her back door and slept under her husband’s truck, she said.
Her house was once her grandmother’s house. Her brother was allowed to stay there in the basement before his grandmother died, and mother and daughter believe he still considers it his home base.
“It’s not because we’re not trying to get him treated,” said Alejandro. Her brother, she said, “took self-medications” and used methamphetamine and hallucinogenic mushrooms. “There is nothing more we can do to help him. It is his own free will. “
If she happens to see her brother, she gives him a protein bar and some water – but never cash, which could lead to an overdose.
His school days gave little indication of what was to come. He attended Jackson Elementary School in Everett and was a wrestler at Marysville Middle School. As a senior project at Marysville Arts & Tech, he and a friend ran a pet food campaign.
However, the many jobs he had in a car wash and in retail were short-lived.
His parents had split up and his father later died of cancer, Bowers said. She works as a contract security officer at PUD in Snohomish County. She monitors surveillance cameras and, on night shifts, sometimes has to scare away others sleeping on the PUD property.
Bowers has mixed feelings about the “no-sit, no-lie” ordinance passed by Everett City Council in March. The ordinance is not expected to come into effect until a pallet protection project behind the Everett Gospel Mission has been completed. It prohibits sitting or lying on sidewalks in a 10-block area east of Broadway between 41st Street and Pacific Avenue.
“I totally understand business,” she said, but when people eat out on the mission, “where are they going to eat?”
“I want my son to be able to sit somewhere, not behind a bush, but outside and visible. He would be less vulnerable, ”said Bowers.
Beverly Bowers wears two pendants, one from Mother Mary and one from the heart with a heart-shaped hole. (Olivia Vanni / The Herald)
Sometimes, she said, her son had a roof over his head. He has served on the Everett Gospel Mission and the Lighthouse Mission in Bellingham. She got a call once to pick him up in Bellingham, but when she got there he had left the shelter.
Alejandro said she and her husband paid to rent him a room in downtown Everett. But he soon disappeared, leaving all his belongings behind.
He has had professional assistance, including stays with Compass Health, in a Fairfax Behavioral Health department on the Pacific campus of the Providence Regional Medical Center Everett and at the Smokey Point Behavioral Health Hospital. He was housed in a motel near Everett Mall from December last December through early March through a local non-profit organization, the Hand Up Project.
If he had treatment plans and medication, “he wouldn’t,” Alejandro said.
Bowers is grateful for the help her son received and remains frustrated with how difficult it has been to find resources.
Today they have a glimmer of hope. With the help of a Catholic Community Services navigator, Bowers said her son had applied for and received disability social security benefits.
They hope he will soon qualify for a studio apartment near downtown Everett as Compass Health prepares to open a new building. It’s right on Broadway at the corner of Lombard Avenue and 33rd Street with 82 supporting units. On Friday the agency celebrated with a virtual opening. The building, which will be associated with treatment and support services, is phase one of the Compass Health Broadway campus redevelopment project.
In the meantime, mother and daughter live with fears and grief. “We mourn the living,” said Alejandro.
“My biggest fear is that he will be found dead somewhere,” Bowers said. “I wear this hole-in-the-heart necklace, that’s how I feel.”
Julie Muhlstein: [email protected]
gallery
Beverly Bowers (right) and daughter Lea Alejandro in Everett. They fear for Bowers’ son who lives on the street. (Olivia Vanni / The Herald)
A teenage photo of Beverly Bowers’ son. (Olivia Vanni / The Herald)
Beverly Bowers wears two pendants, one from Mother Mary and one from the heart with a heart-shaped hole. (Olivia Vanni / The Herald)