Last year, I wrote about a Chula Vista mother’s struggle to find help for her homeless, drug-addicted daughter. The story told how Silvia Irigoyen-Adame turned to every public and private agency she could think of without avail. Her daughter, Elizabeth Torres, died of a fentanyl overdose at the age of 34.
Some people might have been crushed by such an experience. Not Irigoyen-Adame.
Since Torres’ death, Irigoyen-Adame has transformed herself into an energetic advocate for homeless people like her daughter — and for parents whose lives are upended when their children become addicted to drugs and end up on the streets.
She has helped several homeless men and women find housing and drug treatment, befriended mothers seeking to help their own children and repeatedly harangued local officials about the inadequacy of public support programs for homeless drug users.
“Ever since my daughter died, I’ve been more active with the homeless community because I know how I struggled to help [my daughter] and I know how she struggled,” Irigoyen-Adame told me earlier this month. “And it’s so difficult to navigate through the system. They make it seem like it’s easy, but it’s not.”
Irigoyen-Adame and I have stayed in touch since I first wrote about her. We talk on the phone, we’ve met in person a few times and she periodically sends me text messages updating me on the latest homeless person she has befriended or the latest treatment program she has discovered is far more difficult to access than public officials seem to realize.
Her grief, combined with the many heartbreaking stories she has accumulated from people she meets in homeless encampments, has distilled into a slow-burning righteous anger at a system that most San Diegans probably would agree is not working as advertised. Her texts to me are peppered with words in all caps and expressions of disbelief that detox, treatment and shelter programs touted by public agencies are often out of reach to the indigent people they were designed to serve.
“No one monitors these programs,” Irigoyen-Adame texted me recently. “To this day, I have yet to find a detox for any of the [people I’m currently helping because] they do not take MediCal!!”
To give just one example of Irigoyen-Adame’s tenacity and willingness to call out what she sees as bureaucratic ineptitude, she told me how she recently helped a man named Mario Ortega find shelter and drug treatment at the San Diego Rescue Mission. Getting him there, she told me, was a comedy of errors.
Ortega, a onetime gang member who had known Irigoyen-Adame’s husband years earlier, had become addicted to drugs and was living on the streets in Chula Vista. Irigoyen-Adame’s husband ran into him and Irigoyen-Adame offered to help him find shelter. He told her he wanted to enter treatment but couldn’t find a program that would take him.
Irigoyen-Adame got to work. One after another, she said, local treatment program intake staff representatives told her they only accepted clients with insurance. Irigoyen-Adame did find one program that would take someone like Ortega — but they couldn’t take him right then because he’d injured his head in a fight and staff wanted him to go to the hospital first.
Irigoyen-Adame took Ortega to the hospital then lost track of him after he was discharged. By the time she found him, he was too disheveled to be admitted to the treatment program. Frustrated, Irigoyen-Adame took Ortega to a Chula Vista City Council meeting, introduced him to the Council during public comment and took the city to task for its lack of treatment facilities willing to admit indigent patients.
Several police officers and other city officials met Irigoyen-Adame at the rear of the Council chamber after she finished speaking and offered to help.
“Good luck,” she told them. “It’s impossible to find a bed after 5 p.m.”
The officers and city officials busied themselves on their phones. One by one, Irigoyen-Adame said, they admitted she was right. “Nothing’s available,” they said.
Someone suggested the South County Lighthouse, a shelter and treatment facility in National City that takes clients regardless of ability to pay.
“You need a police referral,” someone else said.
“Can we get that now?” Irigoyen-Adame asked.
“We need our homeless outreach team to do an intake first,” an officer said.
“When can we do that?” Irigoyen-Adame asked.
“Tomorrow.”
Incredulous, Irigoyen-Adame said, “I might lose track of Mario by then. Where’s he going to sleep tonight?”
No one had an answer.
Finally, Irigoyen-Adame paid out of her own pocket for a motel room for Ortega. She picked him up at the motel in the morning, drove him to a park where she’d been told the Chula Vista homeless outreach team would be working, got the intake completed and accompanied Ortega and his police escort to the Lighthouse.
Eventually, Ortega was transferred to the Rescue Mission’s long-term treatment program near downtown San Diego, where, Irigoyen-Adame said, he was progressing well the last time she talked to him.
For years now, Voice of San Diego has been monitoring local governments’ highly imperfect efforts to respond to San Diego’s twin crises of homelessness and drug addiction. The perspective of people like Irigoyen-Adame offers a valuable, on-the-ground counterpoint to the bureaucratic language of government pronouncements and the optimistic reassurances of politicians.
You can be sure I’ll be writing about her, and the issues she helps bring to light, again.
In Other News
The National City Council last week voted to explore creating a city support program for undocumented immigrants that would help immigrants threatened with deportation access county legal assistance and other forms of public support.
The National City Council also last week received an annual update about the city-affiliated A Reason to Survive community arts program, an arts education program that leads community arts classes and projects in the former city library building adjacent to City Hall. Leaders of the program told Councilmembers they had provided 21 different arts programs to 1,078 National City Residents, generating more than $1 million in economic impact via public murals and other forms of community service.