The Times-Picayune — It was only June and already 40 homeless men and women had died on the streets of New Orleans. Mike Miller couldn’t believe what he was seeing. At that rate, the city would hit at least 80 deaths by the end of 2018 — a 33 percent jump from 2017.

Miller, then NOPD’s coordinator of medical and social services, broke down the math to show how staggering those numbers were, even for a population already suffering from some of the worst health outcomes.

About 1,188 homeless people are on the streets of the city and Jefferson Parish on any given night, according to the 2018 point-in-time count by Unity of Greater New Orleans. Reaching 80 deaths would mean that 1 out of every 15 homeless people died that year.

“That would make homelessness one of the greatest threats to your life, more than anything else,” he said. “It would make it the most deadly social condition in the city of New Orleans.”

For Miller, this revelation validated years of what appeared to be thankless work.

Since 2016, he and Robyn Burchfield, a nurse and paramedic with Emergency Medical Services, had been documenting the death of every homeless man and woman in the city, a volunteer effort that involved reviewing police video of nearly every body found and attempting to uncover each person’s tragic story.

It was a grueling project, Miller said, but they thought if they tracked each death, answers might emerge as to why people were dying at such alarming rates, along with possible solutions. He just needed to wait and see how the numbers played out through the end of 2018 and then he and Burchfield could announce their findings.

But Miller never got the chance.

City officials effectively killed the effort through what Miller describes as widespread indifference and a refusal to devote any resources to ensure every homeless death was counted.

So last year’s count stopped at 40. No one knows how many more people died. The final number could be 80. It could be 100. It might be more. It might be less.

Mayor LaToya Cantrell, who initially agreed to an interview to discuss the issue, instead issued a statement saying her administration is dedicated to “finding inclusive and responsible ways to address homelessness.”

The mayor “took an interest in the report put together in prior years,” Communications Director Beau Tidwell said in reference to Miller and Burchfield’s work. “As mayor, she would certainly consider instituting an official annual accounting of homeless deaths. Our health department will be evaluating best practices from other cities.”

To Miller, that seems like an unnecessary step and one that will likely result in yet another year without an official count of homeless persons who died on the streets and in abandoned buildings from heart attacks, strokes, cancer, drug overdoses, beatings and stabbings.

“It’s really disappointing considering we may very well have the best practice already,” Miller said. “Maybe a phone call from the health department to ask what we’ve been doing for the past years might be a good start.”

Bob Erlenbusch, executive director of the Sacramento (Calif.) Regional Coalition to End Homelessness, said that by stalling, New Orleans’ leaders are moving against a nationwide trend of cities monitoring and responding to such deaths.

Two years ago, when Miller and Burchfield started their work, the first time such an effort had been attempted in New Orleans, there were only a handful of cities producing homeless death lists, including Sacramento. “Today, there are probably 40 communities,” Erlenbusch said.

“These people are speaking from beyond the grave and that’s how we’ve been able to educate policy makers and say, ‘This is why we need a year-round shelter. This is why we need increased drug treatment programs,’” Erlenbusch said. “It’s shocking to me that New Orleans apparently doesn’t care about the results.”

‘We’re missing a lot of people’

Miller, 39, has always been drawn to those living on the edges of society. As a social worker dedicated to helping the “sickest of the sick,” there is something he finds particularly tragic about the plight of people left behind. It says more about us as a society, he said, than them as individuals.

“When every system fails, whether it’s the jail system, the hospital system, whether it’s adoption or the juvenile justice system – to get to the point where you’re staying on the street, you don’t just end up there. This doesn’t happen in a void,” he said.

Miller brings up Lonny Mayeaux, one of the 40 people who died homeless in the first half of 2018. Mayeaux, 42, was found on a mattress underneath the elevated I-10 near South Carrollton Avenue. He had been there for days, his body decomposed beyond recognition.

“Think about all the people who get on the Carrollton exit, me included, and looked over and saw a mattress, maybe saw a body. Hundreds? Thousands?” Miller said. “And somebody finally walks up and says, ‘Hey man, c’mon. You haven’t gotten up for two days.’ And he’s decomposed?”

Mayeaux was a First Nation from Canada, born to alcoholic parents and put into the foster system as a baby, according to relatives. He was adopted by an Avondale family but struggled with addiction, spending most of his life cycling between jail and homelessness. He received assistance on multiple occasions and was even placed in an apartment, but it never seemed to work out.

“This guy went into housing at some point. When did he leave? How did he leave? Why didn’t he get back in? Why is it finished with him stinking on a mattress? That’s the point of the social work autopsy,” Miller said. “That’s the point of the list. We can learn something.”

Miller first came to New Orleans from Chicago in 1998 to attend Tulane University. He graduated in 2002 then stayed on to earn his master’s degree in social work.

In 2007, Miller was hired by Unity of Greater New Orleans and for the next eight years, he led the nonprofit’s abandoned building outreach team, scouring more than 20,000 vacant homes, mostly at night, in search of people in need.

This is when Miller first began writing down the names of homeless people who died. There was nothing scientific about this list, he said. It was based largely on word of mouth. But it represented the first attempt to document those who died on the streets of New Orleans.

“People would just tell me, ‘Bob died.’ Oh damn, Bob? Get out of here. OK, well, write it down. I always had about a dozen names by the end of the year. But then I got to the NOPD and realized, holy s—-, we’re missing a lot of people.”

‘How in the hell did this happen?’

After eight years with Unity, Miller took a job with the police department in 2016. His role was to be a “counselor for cops,” as he puts it.

During his first few weeks on the job, Miller noticed NOPD alerts for 29U, the police code for unclassified deaths, something he never saw as a social worker. These are deaths for which an official cause is not readily apparent, so police are notified.

To Miller, a large number of these 29Us appeared to be homeless people as they involved bodies found in parks, on sidewalks, in cars by the side of a road or under highway overpasses. Miller reviewed incident reports, field interview cards, and footage from officer-worn body cameras for each death, looking for any clue that the deceased might be homeless,

Maybe they had been arrested multiple times for public drunkenness in the French Quarter. Or, when asked where they lived during random police stops, maybe they provided the address of a shelter. Often times Miller relied on his 16 years of experience as a social worker.

“You try to be as conservative as possible for a lot of reasons,” Miller said, in describing how he chose to include someone on the list. “If you die in a hotel on Tulane Avenue, well, OK, a lot of people die in a hotel on Tulane Avenue. But does it mean you’re homeless or does it mean you’re passing through town because you got a job going offshore?”

As he investigated every 29U, Miller realized the lists he kept while at Unity had missed many homeless deaths. He needed assistance, so he enlisted the help of Burchfield, who, as a paramedic, was on the frontlines every day, treating a population that in her estimation was getting sicker by the moment and dying at an alarming rate. Burchfield created her own list, which she then sent to Miller for further verification.

The city, which still employs Burchfield, declined a request to make her available for an interview.

The count of homeless deaths wasn’t something public officials requested of Miller and Burchfield. They did it on their own, working nights and weekends, breaking the data down by race, age and gender, pinpointing hotspots and trends.

The most difficult part of the process, Miller said, was reviewing the police body camera footage, which he did for every death NOPD responded to.

“It’s a lot of dead people. You see everything. Suicides, heart attacks, every shooting, every stabbing, every car accident, people dying in nursing homes. Or Lonny, dead under a bridge, decomposed under a blanket,” Miller said referring to Mayeaux. “And with every single one of them, you just kind of wonder, ‘How in the hell did this happen?’”

Complete silence

At the end of 2016, Miller and Burchfield, with the help of Rachael Cheramie Gagliano, a former employee with the New Orleans Coroner, released their first full count. It showed 53 people died that year – three out of four being men. The average age was 47, decades less than the average U.S. life expectancy of 78 years old. Drug overdoses accounted for half of all deaths, followed by blunt force trauma at 25 percent. More than half died on the streets while others were found in abandoned homes, cars and motels, among other places.

But there was more to the investigation than demographics. In 2016, the body of 40- year-old Jaime Deslatte was found behind an Athlete’s Foot store. Through his research, Miller was able to show that police conducted 28 field interviews with Deslatte prior to his death.

Those interviews represented 28 opportunities to put him in touch with housing agencies or substance abuse programs. But the city didn’t have a system that enabled law enforcement to do so.

“The point of this wasn’t to assign blame. It was to say, ‘Where could these systems have intersected better?’” Miller said. “Let’s listen to what these dead people have to say.”

After the 2016 report’s release, Erin Burns, spokeswoman for then-Mayor Mitch Landrieu, said the city would consider introducing an ordinance to make such an annual report a legal requirement, as is done in New York and Philadelphia.

“We’re committed to helping this population in any way we can,” Burns said at the time.

Miller was encouraged. While he was proud of what they accomplished, he knew they likely missed people. They did the best they could, he said, but in the end, it was just two people working during their off hours, trying to produce a project that, in other cities, required the coordination of multiple agencies.

For example, the annual homeless deaths report in Multnomah County in Oregon, where Portland is located, cites 13 people from three city departments on its authors page.

“I don’t think anybody really understood what it entailed to put a name on this list,” Miller said.

Landrieu, however, never introduced the ordinance. No one from his administration even asked for a copy of their report, Miller said. The city council never invited Miller or Burchfield to present their findings. Their respective employers, the police department and EMS, shrugged it off, Miller said.

The only person who reached out was Cantrell, then a councilwoman.

“She said, ‘We’re going to do something about this.’ That was the only thing. Literally. No response from anybody else,” Miller said, his frustration and anger rising.

Around the same time as the report’s release, New Orleans was being hailed nationally as the first city to effectively end veteran homelessness, which means that any veteran found living on the streets would be housed within 30 days. Then-First Lady Michelle Obama even came down to applaud local efforts.

There was little room, it appeared, for negative news that upset the narrative, Miller believed. “Nobody looks good if you’re in charge of a population and people are dying.”

Still, he and Burchfield persisted, and at the end of 2017 they released their second annual list which showed a 13 percent increase in homeless deaths. The reaction was more muted the second time around. There were no promises from city leaders, no phone calls or offers of help. There was no reaction whatsoever, Miller said.

In June of 2018, Miller left the NOPD for the Louisiana Air National Guard, where he now works as director of psychological health for the 159th Fighter Wing. That’s the point when he and Burchfield had documented 40 homeless deaths. The city appeared to be on a troubling trajectory, so Miller asked the police department if he could continue his work after his departure. He said he would do so on a voluntary basis, all he needed was continued access to the NOPD’s computer system.

The NOPD never responded, he said. With that, the project came to an end.

‘It needs to be kept going’

Michele Marchand, an organizer with SHARE/WHEEL, a homeless advocacy coalition in Seattle, called New Orleans’ failure to support the efforts of Miller and Burchfield “stunning news.” She contrasted it with the reaction her organization received 15 years ago when they asked the King County government to consider producing its own annual deaths report.

“They jumped on the idea,” Marchand said. “They saw the wisdom of it, both as a way of tracking trends and figuring out ways to help. Also, the medical examiner really understands there’s something to be said for recognizing the humanity of everyone, even in death.”

The King County report is a joint effort between the medical examiner, epidemiologist, and the county’s data and evaluation manager. After publication, the findings are presented before the county council, which has proven useful, Marchand said.

“They had maps and everyone could see there were a huge number of deaths in north Seattle. One of the councilmembers said, ‘What’s going on there?’ It’s a corridor with a lot of drug involvement and the city later passed funding for outreach workers there,” Marchand said.

“This helps us in real time sound the alarm. The number of suicides is going up. The number of overdoses is going up. The number of hypothermia deaths is going up. Where do we need extra resources?”

That’s exactly how Joshua Holder used Miller and Burchfield’s list. Holder is the founder of Urban Outreach, a faith-based nonprofit in New Orleans that serves the homeless. When the report showed a rash of overdose deaths along the Elysian Fields Avenue corridor in 2017, that’s where Urban Outreach mobilized its efforts.

“We also used it to keep track of our people. It’s such a transient community,” he said of the homeless. “Sometimes they’d just disappear and we didn’t know where they went. But then we come to find out later on, when the list got published, they’re no longer with us.

“It needs to be kept going,” Holder said.

Miller said if the Cantrell administration is willing to make the reporting of homeless deaths a requirement, as so many other cities do, he is willing to lend a hand. The report costs nothing to produce except for manpower and hours, and that’s the least the city can do, he said.

“If we do nothing, then their stories are as dead as they are and as forgotten as they are,” he said. “It means we didn’t learn anything from it.”

Read the original story in the Times-Picayune here.