Cornelius Taylor's promise to visit his family on this past Christmas was one of many that he had broken down on the streets for decades. However, Darlene Cheney couldn't get mad at her troubled cousin, who grew up as a brother. When she called right after her vacation from the tattered camp that he called home, she made plans to take him to the movies.
They never spoke again.
A few weeks later, clearance crews descended from the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church on the block in Atlanta, and their heavy machinery crushed the tent, lying inside undetected.
With homelessness at modern peaks, ideologically different leaders, like President Trump and California Gov. Gavin Newsom, demand the destruction of more camps, as they spread fire and crime, block traffic, block business, block city-wide blocks, covering sidewalks that cover needles and waste.
The Supreme Court bolstered their efforts last year by determining that authorities could ban public sleep.
After the camp fire shut down Atlanta's highway major, Mayor Andre Dickens, a progressive Democrat, launched a campaign last year to remove the camp under the bridge.
“It affects schools, it affects commerce, it affects people's lives,” he said of road closures.
But weeks after a similar fatality in California, Taylor's death underscores the risk of forced removal. They say that sweeps often have unintended consequences, and that many do nothing to accommodate them, while inflicting new trauma to vulnerable people with mental illness or addiction.
If anything, clearance can prolong homelessness by destroying ID cards and medications, disrupting social work, or feeling mistrustful.
“We know this is going to happen again,” said 38-year-old Cheney, who is seeking to finish the clearance. “When I heard it, my breath came out of my body. I don't want to feel the next person what I'm doing.”
After years of mental illness and addiction, Taylor, 46, achieved what was particularly impressive in his life that escaped him. At Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Pastor Martin Luther King Jr. once directed the pulpit, mourners compared him to Jesus.
Sen. Rafael G. Warnock, a Georgia Democrat who is also senior pastor Ebenezer, said:
In the modest home they shared childhood with Mr. Taylor, Mr. Cheney and her brother Derek, both truckers described them as bright and kind men who were hurt in dark teen episodes that he didn't fully understand. He dropped out of high school and resisted their efforts to help while many people complained about seeing homelessness on the brink of dad. His baptism in the prison chapel raised hopes for unfulfilled change, but he said that none of his struggles justified his fate.
“Whether he was high as a kite or hungry like a hippo, he didn't deserve to be crushed,” Cheney said.
Ubiquitous urban issues
Federal counts make around 274,000 people sleep outdoors. Some people are unable to find shelter beds, while others reject them as danger or locked up. Unsheltered homelessness has grown nearly 60% within 10 years, and rising prices are often cited as a cause. The Covid-era aid and eviction ban has paused past population growth, but has averaged nearly 400 people per week over the past two years.
While individuals slept long outside, camps (usually groups of people in tents) have become ubiquitous over the past decade or so. Residents say that while the camp promotes safety, nurturing, bonding and attracts aid, critics see torts and threats to public safety. Trump called the unsheltered homeless “violent and dangerously confused” and pledged to remove them from public places.
Conservative Manhattan Institute Judge Glock served as an expert witness in the Phoenix case that forced the camp to close. He said the concentration of people with mental illness or drug problems increases violent crimes — putting the lives of homeless people at risk — and the closure of camps has increased the likelihood of seeking hard work and family support.
“The most important reason for closing camps is that they are dangerous to the homeless themselves,” he said.
However, clear sites are dangerous. Three weeks before the death of Taylor, a malfunctioning man in Valleyho, California, he was fatally crushed as he lay undetectable under a blanket. Clearrun Crew only noticed it when his body was hanging from the bucket of his backhoe.
In 2018, a woman from Modesto, California died when she was crushed while sleeping in a cardboard box. In 2021, the front loader removed the tent under Washington, DC, covered what he had lofted with the sleeping man, and sent him to the hospital with minor injuries.
The more general harm is less obvious. Loss of identification makes it difficult to find a home or work. Lost medication leaves the illness untreated. Unwilling displacement can put people to sleep in more dangerous places, break social connections, and interfere with mental disorders.
Some cities send outreach workers a few months in advance to help people move, but protocols and adherence vary widely. The bulldozer and the chaos that comes with it can almost arrive with warnings.
A study of nearly 400 unmoving people in Denver found that people displaced by clearance are more likely to have an infection, use drugs, and are more likely to cause frostbite, fever stroke, or mental health decline. A study in Santa Clara County, California found that rescue “directly harmed the health of the immobilized people.”
A presentation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Public Health Expert warned that involuntary displacement is “not an effective or sustainable solution” for unsheltered homelessness.
Sweeps seem particularly dangerous to people who inject drugs. You may lose a clean needle or syringe. Careful relationships with friends. Access to known suppliers. Or naloxone, a drug that reverses overdose.
A study from the Journal of the American Medical Association estimated that involuntary displacement increases deaths in injectable drug users by almost 25% due to overdose and increased infections. Lead author, Dr. Joshua Barocas, of the University of Colorado School of Medicine, said in an interview that the rate leads to additional deaths of more than 5,000 homeless people a year.
“These people are already suffering. We shouldn't make their lives worse,” he said.
The cycle of prisons and homelessness
In Atlanta, Mayor Dickens has been a longtime advocate for affordable housing. Last year, the city committed $68 million to a $212 million public-private campaign aimed at housing the entire city's homeless population. He is also called a clearance essential to public safety.
The Old Wheat Street camp where Taylor lived sits in a calm neighborhood on the block from both the Ebenezer Church and the National Park Service Visitor Center, which offers tours of Dr. King's childhood home. The tent swarm closed small streets, bringing complaints of drug use and vandalism.
Outreach workers began almost a year ago to help 30 or so residents find shelter, with the January 16 clearance scheduled for about three weeks ago, said Cathryn Vassell, chief executive of Partners for Home, a nonprofit that helps cities coordinate homeless services. She said the timing of the clearance is being driven in part by the upcoming King Day Parade. Additional pressure to close the camp was told to the city council, but he said it came from a man active in the community who threatened to destroy it himself if officials failed to act.
Mr. Taylor stayed there for years. Born to a troubled mother in the countryside of Georgia, he was taken toddler by his father's aunt, Katherine Cheney, and had a stable job and home in Atlanta. When her son and daughter followed, she raised three as brothers.
Young pairs, Derek and Darren, called Mr. Taylor a sensitive and loving child, often spread across his mother's knees. “He felt deeper than the others,” said 43-year-old Cheney. But something changed before the eighth grade, after his biological mother insisted on spending the summer in a village 50 miles away.
Worried about the abuse, Katherine Cheney quickly snatched him back, but he retreated in anger and refused to argue about what had happened. Taylor's girlfriend, Lolita Griffs, said in an interview he told her he was abused during his time. He soon left school at home with the 10th graders. When Katherine Cheney died of cancer several years later, he attended the funeral for her release from prison.
He then circulated between prison and homelessness, seeking a rest for cocaine, resisting mental illness medication, which paralyzed him. On a good day, a friend discovered he was protective and kind. A bad day evoked his street name, Psycho. “If he didn't go his own way, all hell would be unleashed,” Griffs said.
Many people on the streets have exhausted the goodwill of their families, but Taylor's relatives say they have never given up hope of a happy return. Darlene Chaney spoke to him with a medical and legal appointment scheduled for a week or two each week, revealing that she and Chaney still shared if they accepted the rules of the house, such as when he was taking medication. He visited, took a shower, and left with a smile.
“No one gave up on Cornelius.
When Taylor gave nie a recent talk about staying with drugs, Cheney wanted her to turn the corner. Instead, he was in the tent when the heavy machinery arrived on January 16th. Most of the residents had left. City officials said workers checked the remaining tents but never saw Taylor inside before the machine crushed them.
Officers pulled him out and called an ambulance when his mouth was foaming, police reports. Witnesses told police that Taylor was using crack cocaine, which may explain why he didn't listen to the warning.
Police reports speculated he may have overdose, but this week's medical examiner's office found he died of a “blunt force injury” that included a broken pelvis and a lacerated liver and spleen.
More trouble reached the camp: Someone slashed some remaining tents. Police arrested 42-year-old Daniel Burnett. He overtook the workers he identified as a man who threatened vigilantes' behaviour if the city did not clear the area. He works in a nearby nonprofit developer building, complaining with the Atlanta Journal Constitution that the camp had raised insurance rates.
Davis, a family lawyer, said the city may have acted “hurried and recklessly” in clearing the camp and valued its property “more than human life.”
Death near the famous church inevitably led to a greater quest for meaning. At Taylor's funeral, Rev. Warnock warned that poor people are often crushed by larger troops. He said he took Dr. King to Memphis where the strike assassinated began after two workers were crushed and died in a garbage truck.
Cheney focused on the vicinity of her home and directed Taylor herself to speak out. “I couldn't save you, but I pray that everyone who failed will be able to save the next one,” she said.
