A Tenant Who Paid Tragically

After scattering hundreds of copies of her suicide note from the seventh-floor ledge of a downtown building, Mary Jesus held her nose and raised an arm in the air.

Then, like a swimmer taking a plunge, she leapt to her death.

“Goodbye cruel world and all that,” said the note, which blamed her suicide on an eviction she had battled fiercely -- and unsuccessfully. “Everyone will say what they always say when something totally preventable isn’t prevented, ‘Why didn’t anybody do anything?’ ”

In the six months since her death at 33, Mary Jesus has become a symbol. Tenant leaders have highlighted her death as one of eviction’s darkest consequences in an era of rising rents and an urgent shortage of affordable housing.

Landlords say they are not to blame and draw a different lesson. They point to failings in a mental health system that, they say, should have rescued Mary Jesus long before she stepped onto that balcony in the Oakland Tribune tower.

Many Oakland tenants have been swept out of their apartments by an overheated housing market. Most go quietly. Mary Jesus -- stubborn, articulate, unstable -- orchestrated a final act of defiance.

Diagnosed with depression and borderline personality disorder, she was stable as long as she had stable housing. But like others in similar situations, once her sanctuary was threatened, she lost her grip.

She was born Mary Jesus Brazil to Catholic, Portuguese immigrant parents in the Central Valley town of Turlock.

A photo from age 6 shows her smiling in her bedroom, a pet bird perched on her head. Months later, she was bouncing from domestic violence shelter to cheap motel with her mother and siblings.

At age 10, Mary’s family said, she found her mother in the kitchen with a wound to her chest, her father hovering with a butcher knife. Her mother survived. Her father served prison time. They divorced.

Mary endured stints in foster homes, in juvenile hall and on the streets. With her 10-inch blue mohawk and counterculture views, “Mary just broke the mold in Turlock,” said her oldest sister, Maria Kurtenbach, 45.

In the punk-rock underground, she found like-minded spirits, uncompromising in their rejection of what they considered a sexist, class-based society.

She found her sanctuary in Apartment #15 on the first floor of a 1913 building on Oakland’s Alice Street, a neighborhood of stately but dilapidated buildings in the shadow of downtown. The rent, when she moved in 14 years ago, was $550 a month.

Mary refurbished the wood floors and hung black lace curtains. She painted the one-bedroom unit black and red in a Japanese motif and decorated with her own paintings -- dark explorations of death that challenged Christian symbolism.

“She really loved the place,” said Emmely Dittmann, who with her husband, Hans, owned the 30-unit building known as the Dunsmuir Apartments for decades. Mary looked to the couple as surrogate parents. They hired her as manager.

She took to wearing all black. She learned to garden. She cut ties with her family, and to purge her father from her past, she ditched the name Brazil, becoming, simply, Mary Jesus.

In 1998, as the dot-com boom swept the Bay Area, the Dittmanns sold the building for $1.3 million to Mark Roemer and James L. Lewis, who were fast accruing Oakland properties.

As San Francisco refugees flooded Oakland, vacated units often rented at a 35% markup, said James Vann, of Oakland’s Tenants Union.

Landlords are now bound by a 2002 law that requires “just cause” for eviction. But during the boom’s early days, a 30-day notice sufficed, even if a tenant was current on rent. Anne Omura, director of Oakland’s Eviction Defense Center, recalls “grabbing lawyers off the street” to help tenants fight evictions.

Roemer and Lewis could have served Mary Jesus with a 30-day notice. But there was an initial truce. After Mary posted memos around the building noting that the new owners were violating the law by not having an on-site manager, they hired her, waiving her rent as the Dittmanns had. She kept the building clean and welcomed newcomers.

She tacked notes of gratitude from tenants on her wall. “Thanks again for really pulling through for us,” one couple wrote in May 1999. “It’s a crazy war out there to get an apartment. Being young and black probably didn’t help us any either.”

“She was a really good manager,” said tenant Geoffrey Andersen, 27. “If there was a plumbing problem, she’d get on the maintenance guy.... She took the whole building very seriously.” But her demeanor intimidated some. In her black outfits, black lipstick and parasol, she often talked -- with a laugh and flourish -- about having been raped or about her occasional work in the sex industry, Andersen recalled.

“If you were friendly, her attention to you became oppressive,” he said. “If you ignored her, she was hostile.”

Mary Jesus’ friendships often ended abruptly. But when she was feeling good, she was charming. In 1998, she cold-called V. Vale, whose Re/Search Publications gives voice to challengers of the mainstream, to pitch a memoir on her punk days.

In late-night conversations that lasted hours, he listened to her tales and encouraged her.

“She was a genius in a way,” Vale said.

But her home situation was taking a toll. Tensions with Roemer and Lewis flared, court filings show. Mary Jesus contended that she bore the brunt of their anger when another tenant called code inspectors.

By her account, Roemer pressed her to offer money to entice an elderly tenant to move out -- freeing the unit for a rent hike. Mary Jesus told tenants that the landlords were “evil.”

In July 2000, court records indicate, she was taken to Alameda County Medical Center’s psychiatric facility.

The following May, Roemer and Lewis notified her that her tenure as manager was over. She could keep her apartment but would be expected to pay rent of $599.50 a month.

“She was a tough personality to deal with,” said Steven Edrington, executive director of the Rental Housing Assn. of Northern Alameda County, a landlords group.

Roemer and Lewis did not respond to requests for an interview.

Mary Jesus applied for and began receiving food stamps and $336 in monthly General Assistance. The Alameda County checks went directly to her landlords. Increasingly anxious about leaving home, she earned the rest of her rent money by working as a phone-sex provider from her apartment.

Mary Jesus complained to the owners that she could not obtain rental receipts or locate the manager to pay. Sometimes, money orders were cashed, she documented in court filings, yet she was notified that her payments had not been received. She complained about junk in hallways and broken mailboxes.

She objected fiercely to use of the name “Brazil” in letters from the owners, convinced that they did it to harass her. Her mental health was deteriorating.

“I thought for sure that if I made it to 30 the demons would stop tormenting me,” she wrote in her diary in late 2001. “But it has only gotten worse.”

Mary Jesus often burned incense in her bathroom, triggering the fire alarm -- some believed intentionally. The manager encouraged tenants to file police reports against her after incidents of verbal abuse.

“I could tolerate Mary Jesus, but I can’t say she was a good presence in the building,” Andersen said. “I was always surprised there wasn’t some way to get rid of such a disruptive tenant.”

That, landlords say, is precisely the problem: Nuisance tenants are particularly hard to evict under the “just cause” law, Edrington said. “Nuisance is very hard to prove,” he said. “Landlords are between a rock and a hard place.”

So was Mary Jesus. She needed Medi-Cal coverage to pay for the mental health care she required. But she could receive Medi-Cal benefits only if she qualified for federal Supplemental Security Income, known as SSI.

Kimberly Satterfield, a county social worker who helps clients obtain SSI, tried to assist. She arranged for psychologist Jeremy Coles to evaluate Mary Jesus. Coles noted numerous problems, including borderline personality disorder. But SSI is difficult to obtain, Coles said, and such a diagnosis would not guarantee it. Mary Jesus chose not to undertake the grueling process.

“She’s a classic person who falls through the cracks,” he said. While Mary Jesus’ condition made it hard for her to disengage from her landlords, Coles said, “she wouldn’t have needed to be in this conflict had she gotten some support.”

Satterfield bent the rules to keep seeing Mary Jesus. She scrounged up vouchers for a gym -- the closest thing to therapy the county could offer.

“She comes in completely dressed in black, with black gloves and sunglasses, and a jacket on that says ‘Kill Christ,’ and then she wonders why people are offended,” Satterfield said. “It’s like, ‘Mary, well hello!’ ”

Then Satterfield was transferred to another unit. She last saw Mary Jesus in August 2003, when she took the stand in a small claims case that Mary Jesus had brought against Roemer. A month earlier, Mary Jesus had beat an eviction attempt by proving to a jury that her landlords had grossly miscalculated what she owed in back rent. Now she was suing for “intentional emotional distress.” She lost.

Satterfield did not know whether Mary Jesus’ landlords had wronged her, she testified, but the conflict had clearly triggered Mary’s despair.

“Homelessness,” Satterfield said, “was her greatest fear.”

In late 2003 and early 2004, the landlords twice attempted to raise Mary Jesus’ rent. She successfully fought both increases before Oakland’s Rent Adjustment Program, arguing that she had not been given legal notice.

But in early 2004, a hearing officer inaccurately concluded that Mary Jesus was ahead in her rent. She took the liberty of paying less. For the first time in years, she bought a pair of shoes that cost more than $10 -- black pumps with spiked silver heels. By the time the officer corrected his mistake, she was in arrears.

The rent board backed her again, ruling that she had fallen behind inadvertently. Even so, Mary Jesus owed her landlords $1,018.77. That was “just cause” for removing her.

Last August, Roemer and Lewis filed another eviction action against her in Alameda County Superior Court.

“They wanted her out,” said Mona Breed, director of the nonprofit Sentinel Fair Housing, where Mary Jesus sought help. “She kept reminding them about all the things she used to do that they no longer did.”

Sentinel, which does not provide legal advice, referred Mary Jesus to attorneys. But -- buoyed by her first jury victory -- she chose to fight alone.

“The whole process of fighting them became her reason to be alive,” Breed said.

Mary Jesus filed a new lawsuit against her landlords, alleging retaliation and discrimination because of her mental disability.

On Sept. 28, she pinned a new $5 hairpiece to her bangs, donned a black velvet pantsuit and presented her defense in the eviction action. But she was now far enough behind in her rent that the judge ruled against her. The eviction was set for Oct. 7.

Mary Jesus was in her final stretch. “I will be homeless because I have nowhere else to live,” she wrote in an Oct. 5 motion seeking a delay in the eviction. “I have attempted suicide in the past, and I’m afraid if I’m evicted, I will become suicidal again.”

The next two months brought a series of emergency motions for reconsideration. Twice, Mary Jesus won 30-day stays of the eviction. To pay her rent, she borrowed $900 from Vale’s wife, Marian Wallace.

Twice, she was hospitalized at the county’s psychiatric facility after exhibiting signs of extreme anxiety in court.

“I am scared and nervous,” she wrote in one motion for a reprieve. “I am so close to having everything turn out OK. Please, please just give me one more chance. Just one more month, and all my court cases will be heard, and if I lose them I SWEAR! I WILL MOVE!”

Mary had a Dec. 17 hearing to present new facts. But on the morning of Dec. 7 -- the day of the scheduled eviction -- she learned that she had lost a final attempt to defer the ouster.

Once again, she was transported to the county psychiatric hospital in restraints.

Mary Jesus was released that day. Returning to her apartment, she put her belongings in plastic bags and hung them as gifts on the doorknobs of neighbors. She then set several fires and tried to hang herself.

She was back in the psychiatric ward Dec. 8. The following day, she was released to the custody of Wallace.

Edrington said that Lewis spent hours on the phone trying to track Mary Jesus down. He was astounded to hear she had been released.

In San Francisco, Wallace and Mary Jesus searched the Internet for rooms to rent. Mary Jesus did her laundry. When she left in the morning to run errands in Oakland, Vale and Wallace expected her back.

Instead, she wrote a suicide note, complete with court case numbers, and photocopied it. She took the elevator to the balcony of the Tribune tower, climbed the railing and tossed the notes. A crowd of 200 people gathered.

In negotiations with police and fire personnel, Mary Jesus at times moved away from the ledge and appeared to relax, witnesses said. Then she would scoot to the edge, prompting screams from onlookers.

After more than half an hour on the ledge, Mary Jesus’ breathing quickened, and she plunged off the edge.

That day, her checking account posted a negative balance from an overdraft penalty.

Advocates for the disenfranchised have taken up Mary Jesus’ story in search of a larger message. They point to a dearth of affordable housing and a legal system skewed against the poor, noting that for $1,018.77, Mary Jesus’ death might have been averted.

“The suicide of Mary Jesus is a prophetic warning of what Mohandas Gandhi once declared,” wrote Terry Messman, editor of Street Spirit, a paper distributed by the homeless and published by the American Friends Service Committee. “Poverty is the worst form of violence.”

Messman recently presented Mary Jesus’ story to a nationwide gathering of community organizers and homeless activists in Berkeley.

“I believe this death was a profoundly important act of protest,” Messman said in an interview. “She touched the heart of the community of Oakland in a way no other eviction has touched us and no other homeless death -- and there have been many -- has touched us.”

Edrington blames a porous mental health system that makes property owners “the last line of defense.”

“Obviously, Mary Jesus needed more than just regular housing,” he said. “That’s the tragedy.

“They were frustrated with her,” he said of her landlords. “I know I wouldn’t want her to be my tenant.... But nobody wants to see somebody go that way.... If we can all learn something from it, I’d like to.”