Four men shared sadness, alcohol, death

Bad news for a city that tries to do right by its homeless. Sad news for those they left behind.

Now, a month and many news stories later, there's still no official cause of death, and two more men have been found dead outdoors. We know almost nothing of the latest two -- not even their names have been released -- but small windows have opened into the lives of some of the others.

Stanley Ivey, Wesley Small, Simeon Boots and Danny Wright.

"I mean, they all have a mother, a brother, a sister, a child," says Lesa Stivers, who's done homeless outreach for seven years through her church. "They all have families somewhere. And every one of them has a story."

The story she's most familiar with is Danny Wright's. The one they called Papa Smurf. He was the last of the four found in May, his body floating face down in Campbell Creek.

He was her father.

She barely knew him. Her parents split when she was little. She knows it was bad, and that her mother brought her and her brother to Alaska for a reason.

"My mom actually was trying to get us away, to make sure we were somewhere he couldn't find us."

He didn't. But at 15, Stivers tracked him down and he moved up so they could get to know each other. But by 17, she'd had enough. She told him she couldn't have him around until he got sober. That was the last time she ever saw him. It was 1993.

Stivers got on with her life but always wondered. As far as she knew, Wright had gone back to Iowa and was living on the streets down there. Every now and then she'd get on the Internet to see if his obituary would pop up.

"If he was alive, there was still hope," she said.

She's now 33 and married with children. The volunteer work she does through her church takes her to the Anchorage Rescue Mission, where her father stayed off and on, and through homeless camps around town. If she ever passed by him in the woods or on some street corner, she never knew it.

When she picked up his belongings at the Mission on Tudor Road, all they amounted to were clothes, a toothbrush, some deodorant, a comb and a few other odds and ends stuffed in a duffle bag. She cleaned out his storage unit last week. The only things with any meaning for her were her father's honorable discharge papers from the U.S. Marine Corps and an album with photographs of her grandparents and other family she never really knew.

The Rev. Juanita Mahieu probably knew him better than anyone. She's his sister in Davenport, Iowa. Two other siblings died as infants so it was just the two of them growing up. She called him "Bubby."

As a kid, he was in Boy Scouts, loved playing cowboy and would make tents over the clothesline and camp out in the backyard. He was fascinated with dinosaurs. He built model cars. And he was always getting himself in trouble for some dumb thing or other. Once over the holidays, the two of them were wrestling and he knocked over the fully decorated Christmas tree. Another year he talked her into secretly opening their presents and taping them back up so their parents would never know.

"We didn't do that again," she said. "It kind of ruined it for us."

In Iowa, he worked as a cook and a carpet layer. At one point he had a home and a family.

Drinking changed everything. His sister thinks it got much worse after his divorce.

Even after he became homeless, she said, there were times he did better than others. "He had places a lot of times. But then he'd start drinking and mess it up for himself.

"I didn't want to enable him by giving him too much money. But it was very hard for me to have him on the streets.

"I prayed for him a lot. I loved him. He was my only brother."

Wright was good about keeping in touch, Mahieu said, especially this past year when he would call as many as two or three times a week. He always told her how much he missed everyone. She thinks he was really lonely.

She last heard from him May 10 when he called to wish her a happy Mothers Day.

"He told me he was camping with some guys, that the weather was getting nice, that they had to worry about bears. He sounded pretty happy."

She got another call a few days later. Police found her name and phone number on a receipt inside her brother's pocket.

So what happened to Danny Wright? How did he get from a Midwestern kid with a dog named Queenie and who wanted to be a firefighter to living and dying the way he did?

All four of the men who died in that 10-day stretch had dark sides, some darker than others. That's all documented down at the courthouse with strings of charges for domestic violence, assault, disorderly conduct -- the kinds of bad stuff that happens when alcohol brings out the worst in people, especially those who have enough problems without it.

What got them there, why they drank so hard, why they got on that downward spiral and didn't or couldn't get off, may be answered somewhere in the confidential files of treatment programs and other social service agencies that tried to help them. Or maybe those answers will be buried with them.

Ramona Christiansen has done outreach for chronic homeless alcoholics through Cook Inlet Tribal Council for years She knew all the guys who died, except for Wesley Small.

"There was sadness, yes, absolutely," she said. "They all carried it."

Generally speaking, the issues driving self-destruction can come from a range of things, she said -- mental illness, zero self-esteem, unresolved pain, childhood abuse or neglect. She's seen some work really hard to get past these things and turn their lives around. She seen some work really hard and give up in frustration. Those who don't make it, whose addictions cost them everything, understand each other in ways most others can't.

"The homeless population is a family within a family," she said. "They have each other."

And when one of them dies, it's like any death in the family.

GOING HOME

Little is known about Wesley Small, found May 12 in a tent in the woods off Third and Orca, other than he was 50, seemed to be new to Alaska, was on disability and has a mother in California.

Simeon Boots had plans. He wanted to get out of Anchorage, to go home. He finally did, but not the way he envisioned.

A cousin, Peter Alexie, answered a call to Boots' auntie's house in Russian Mission. Everyone else was down at the airstrip, he said. They'd gone to meet the plane bringing Boots' body home.

Boots has family all the way down the Yukon from Russian Mission to Alakanuk, Alexie said. They'd been gathering and waiting a long time, first for his body to be released by authorities, then for the air strip, swamped by Yukon River flooding, to dry out.

As his cousin tells it, Boots grew up in this Yup'ik village of 320, where his father did school maintenance work. He was kind of shy. He loved sports, especially volleyball and basketball. He did a lot of hunting and fishing.

Life changed abruptly when he was 12. His mother died of an aneurism or stroke, something sudden and unexpected, Alexie said. He thinks that was pretty hard on Boots, though he never once heard him talk about it.

After high school, Boots joined the Army. When he got out, he ended up in Bethel working as a janitor.

It was a good job and things went well for him for a while, Alexie said.

But there's lots of drinking in Bethel, and lots of trouble. Boots found both, and it got worse after he came to Anchorage.

"I guess a lot of people in the villages don't do good with alcohol," Alexie said.

It was different when Boots was home in Russian Mission, where his family was, where alcohol is banned.

"We never seen him like that," Alexie said. "When he was out here he was always ready to help you. He was a good helper guy. He would never ask for anything. He would always ask how we were doing.

"Nobody knew he was living on the street. Last I heard he was still a janitor."

Some friends Boots kept in touch with said he'd called a week before he died. He talked of moving back to the village, of building himself a house, of starting over. He also mentioned that living in Anchorage was harder than he thought.

His body was found May 14 at Campbell Park off Tudor and Laurel, curled up on the ground in the fetal position. Simeon Boots was 38.

TO WALK ALONE

Stanley Ivey was a generous person on the street, according to Dusty Fratis, who does outreach for Homeward Bound, a program for chronic homeless alcoholics.

"If you were his friend, he'd do anything for you. He'd give you his last dollar.

"For the most part he was somebody who stuck to himself. Some people would rather walk alone, you know."

Thomas Huhndorf, a board member of CIRI, knew another Stan Ivey. That one worked and had a roof over his head. He was an electrician and had been his foreman for a while during construction of the Alaska Native Medical Center years ago.

"I respected him as a fellow human being and as an electrician," he said.

But Ivey had "a righteous temper. He burned pretty hot."

Huhndorf doesn't know what was behind it. About all Ivey told him was that he was from McGrath and from the sound of it, had a pretty rough childhood. He worked seasonally out there as a firefighter, and survived a helicopter crash that knocked his front teeth out but killed some of the others on board.

The rest of his life story he kept to himself.

He also knew Ivey had drinking trouble but not why it took over what seemed like a productive life.

Once, when he disappeared from the job for three weeks, Huhndorf tracked him down at a motel in Spenard and talked him into coming back, giving it another shot.

Ivy tried. It didn't last.

"He would work very hard (on the job) like a lot of people will when you have a focus. But you can't do that forever. You get tired and run out of steam. Stan would run out of steam. And then he'd backslide.

"You can't just not drink; you have to have something else. Once they wake the monster in them, it's hard for them to come back.

"With Stan, it was just complicated. He was someone worth saving, but could you?"

You couldn't, not in time anyway. He'd been through Homeward Bound and other rehab programs, but the monster eventually won. His body was found May 7, during a spring cleanup in the woods off 20th and Karluk. He was 58.

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Find reporter Debra McKinney online at adn.com/contact/dmckinney.

MEMORIAL: A memorial service is planned today for the six homeless men found dead over the past month at Bean's Cafe, 3 p.m. The public is invited.