Volunteering with the unhoused one struggles to maintain a sense of perspective. The system is so broken, the need so vast, one can easily justify behaviors which would be unthinkable in a professional organization. When one is (or imagines one is) addressing a crisis—helping a mother with her infant child, trying to separate an unhoused woman from an abusive partner, or get a long-time acquaintance into rehab—it is easy to brush aside semi-official protocol. Every experienced outreach volunteer has gone out alone to visit an encampment or given their phone number to a participant.
At first, looking into Gaya’s death seemed only an extension of these regular irregular activities. Increasingly it was becoming clear my behavior was outside the scope of my organization, and potentially dangerous. The day after Nil cut off contact, an unhoused friend who heard I’m looking into Gaya’s murder texts me an admonition. “…[Be] careful bcz she burned A LOT of bridges and severely pissed off a lot of people…the list of suspects has to be 10 miles long…Maybe longer.”
Willy would have to be included on that list. A rail thin, silver-haired Armenian man, he was Gaya’s partner before she took up with Carl. Willy lives about half a mile downriver from where Gaya was killed, beneath the white spire of the Atwater Village Horse Bridge, in a tent surrounded by a small junkyard of scavenged bike parts. I find him searching through a pile of busted tire tubes and ask him about Gaya.
“I don’t want to talk about that fucking bitch,” he tells me, then proceeds to do so. He says that she’d been on the streets long before he met her, and he doesn’t know anything about how she got there. He says she’s been “making her way up the river from Frogtown,” and that her M.O. was to find a man she could use as a protector, move in, steal from them, then find another man to protect her against the first before repeating the cycle. He says this is what happened to him. He says he let her move into his tent a few months back, but that she quickly proved to be trouble. He says she was a thief and describes her habit of stealing his possessions in front of him, then daring him to respond. When he finally decided to throw her out, Willy says Gaya refused to leave and even tried to provoke him into hitting her so she could call the cops.
Willy’s loathing of Gaya is venomous, unpleasant to be around. “Usually when someone dies you feel something here,” he says, tapping his hollow chest, “but for that bitch? Nothing.” Several times during our conversation he says that he wanted to kill her or would have killed her.
But he says that about several other people too – about Nil and Carl, about John and Lunatic who live underneath Colorado, about most of his neighbors. Willy’s is a world of constant conflict, some hypothesized, some real, and it is difficult to distinguish between the two. He says that Nil is a psychopath, that he assaulted some people in a neighboring encampment and once threatened him with a knife. In truth, Willy’s dislike for his neighbors is nearly universal. At one point he recommends that someone come by with a bulldozer and push out all the people living on the river, adding that this hypothetical driver should be “given a medal.”
Willy concludes our conversation with a suggestion that I abandon any further investigation into Gaya's death. “Forget about her,” he says, “she isn’t worth your trouble.”
