Snyder, Activist for Homeless, Is Found Dead

Mitch Snyder, the man whose hunger strikes and acid commentary made him the nation’s best-known advocate for the homeless, was found dead Thursday in his room in a Washington shelter in what police said was an “apparent suicide by hanging.”

Although police found a suicide note, they said that its contents would not be released before the investigation into Snyder’s death is completed.

Friends of Snyder, who was 46, and his fiancee said that the couple had experienced a rocky, on-again, off-again relationship but in September had announced their engagement to be married by radical priest Daniel Berrigan. Snyder had met Berrigan while in jail for car theft in the 1970s.

Last week, Snyder lost a major battle with the city government when a law guaranteeing overnight shelter to anyone in need was scaled back. He also had been under pressure because of dissension within the organization he founded.

“We all feel Mitch was a very intense person who very much lived on the edge, and we’re very, very sad he’s gone,” said Jeff Dietrich of the Catholic Workers community on Los Angeles’ Skid Row. “We know he gave everything he had to the homeless. I’m afraid he just didn’t have anything more to give.”

Police sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Associated Press that the note indicated Snyder was despondent over problems in his personal life. They also said that a second note written during the spring was found in Snyder’s room.

“It was along the same lines” as the note found Thursday, one police source told AP. “It talked about this possibility, sort of outlined what he might do.”

But friends and residents at his Federal City Shelter, who gathered on the steps of the downtown mission under storm-darkened skies on an oppressively hot afternoon, disputed the report.

“I saw him two days ago when (Nation of Islam leader Louis) Farrakhan came,” said April Thomas, a shelter resident. “He was smiling, happy. This don’t make sense.”

Carol Fennelly, a shelter employee and Snyder’s fiancee, broke the news to reporters and mourners. As a violent summer storm whipped the trees on the sidewalk outside the shelter, Fennelly said that members of his Community for Creative Non-Violence are “greatly shocked and saddened by the loss of Mitch.”

“Mitch always said good things happened when it rained,” Fennelly said, fighting back tears. “He was wrong today.”

Snyder first catapulted into the public eye in 1984, when he went on a 51-day hunger strike that ended when President Reagan made a promise just before the presidential election that year to renovate an aging shelter for Washington’s homeless people several blocks from the U.S. Capitol.

Snyder was near death before Reagan, who was flying on Air Force One, pledged to turn the shelter into a model for the nation. The plans later were scrapped over funding problems.

That provoked another hunger strike two years after the first.

As he began that fast, Snyder burned a copy of the President’s proposed budget and wiped the ashes on his head. “What the President is doing to the homeless is unthinkable, un-American and a disgrace,” Snyder said.

He later won federal funds for the 1,400-bed shelter, the Federal City Shelter where he died. It was only one instance of many when he successfully brow-beat federal and local governments into providing more money for the homeless.

But his tactics and abrasive style did not endear him to all. His strongest supporters praised his single-mindedness and extreme devotion--qualities that also made him enemies.

He defended his methods by saying: “When you represent powerless people, you have to fight every step of the way.” He came under criticism from many in his own movement recently when he refused to cooperate with the Census Bureau in its efforts to count the homeless this spring. Last March, he announced plans to take a sabbatical from the shelter and enter a Roman Catholic Trappist Monastery in Virginia.

His death, in the words of Dietrich, left workers and homeless alike “devastated.”

“Regardless of one’s opinion of how he did what he did for the homeless, no one would disagree that he did a lot for them and that his untimely death is tragic,” said Alice Callaghan of Los Angeles’ Las Familias del Pueblo.

“He’ll be sorely missed. It’s so sad to think that for someone who worked so tirelessly for the homeless, he was unable to help himself at the end, or ask for help.”

Residents of the Federal City Shelter, some crying, others shouting, speculated over the motive.

Vernon Devolis, a 62-year-old homeless man from Philadelphia, walked around slowly and repeated: “Why? Why? That’s what I want to know. Why? The man loved life. He loved all of us. I guess he just gave up on himself.”

Noting that Snyder was close to death on two of his hunger strikes, 20-year-old Teresa Lee, who is homeless, asked: “If he wanted to kill himself, why didn’t he kill himself then?”

“I just want to know what’s going to happen now--I’m frightened,” said 23-year-old Tina, who declined to give her last name because she feared losing her job as a security guard if her boss learned she was homeless.

Snyder grew up in New York City, married, had two sons and worked as a washing machine salesman, a vacuum cleaner salesman and a job counselor before quitting and leaving his family in 1969. After his stint in federal prison for car theft, he landed homeless on Skid Row.

Snyder’s life was dramatized in the television movie “Samaritan: The Mitch Snyder Story,” in which he was portrayed by actor Martin Sheen. Sheen later became a staunch Snyder supporter.

News of Snyder’s death spread quickly. Steven Donziger, a Harvard law student working for the District of Columbia public prosecutor’s office, rode over on his bike after hearing the news on the office radio.

“I’ve followed him around for 10 years,” Donziger said. “He symbolized for me that meaningful change doesn’t happen for poor people in our country unless you fight, unless you sacrifice.”

Noting that the D.C. City Council had voted last week to reduce funding for homeless shelters, Donziger speculated that Snyder had committed suicide “to call attention to the desperation of this situation.”

D.C. Mayor Marion Barry and the Rev. Jesse Jackson braved the afternoon rain to pay their respects to Snyder.