Home Is Where the Heart Breaks

(This is the second part of a three-part series.)

Sarah Fay was in her grandmother’s garage when she heard screams coming from the front yard. It was just before noon on Feb. 21, 2022, and her brother’s former girlfriend was wailing, “Sarah! Sarah!”

Maybe they are arguing again, Sarah thought, as she and a cousin ran toward the camper-truck that her brother lived in on the street in front of the mid-century ranch-style house in Culver City. 

When they opened the door to the camper, they found Chad dangling from some sort of tie-down strap. Her younger brother had hanged himself.

Their ailing mother, Karon Fay, also heard the screams and ran out to see her only son suspended in the air in the camper. 

Sarah tried to get her 64-year-old mom — who sometimes uses an oxygen mask to breathe — back inside the two-car garage where she lives, but Karon passed out in her daughter’s arms.

When Sarah and her cousin managed to get Chad down, his heart was still beating. They dragged him to the front lawn hoping to save him. But by the time the paramedics arrived, it was too late. 

Chad’s lifeless body stayed on the lawn for six hours.

“The cops were standing next to him the whole entire time,” Sarah explains through tears in the garage nine months later. “There was no tape, there was no shield, absolutely nothing.”

Sarah later pulls out a binder of photos and mementos that she put together to remember her brother. As her mother cries, Sarah reads: “I’m not sure how much you had heard or needed to hear it, but you were loved dearly, my boy. You are truly missed.”

Ten months have now passed since Sarah’s younger brother exhaled his last breath on their grandmother’s lawn. He left no note to explain his actions, leaving his family to guess at his reasons. One thing is certain: That day in February changed the way they all feel about their grandmother’s home.

Left: A “book of Life” that Sarah created to honor her brother, Chad, who died by suicide in February. Right: Karon Fay weeps while speaking about her son.

Not Quite Home

As a teenager, Chad had repeatedly been expelled from school, and he did several stints in juvenile detention. When he was in his mid-20s, his grandmother, Pat Fowler, didn’t want him living in the house because he wouldn’t respect her rules. So Sarah and Chad’s father bought the young man a camper, and his grandparents let him park it in front of the house. The deal was that he could come inside only to shower. 

There are countless paths to becoming unhoused in a country with nearly 600,000 people living on the streets — and far more in precarious circumstances like Sarah’s.

In Sarah’s case, there are her years of annual income of less than $50,000 that haven’t come close to keeping up with the increasing cost of renting an apartment in most of Los Angeles County. Aggravating the situation are questions of credit, mental health, difficulties in relationships and personal-finance savvy on Sarah’s side, while affordable housing construction and government support fall far short of needs.

In Sarah’s housing vulnerability, there is another factor that is less visible: trauma. 

Many young people who don’t have a place to call home lack an important safety net, explains Robin Petering, the founder of a community-based advocacy and research group, Lens Co, which focuses on youth homelessness. Pointing to children growing up in homes or neighborhoods rife with various kinds of abuse, she says, “They may come from families that aren’t safe.” 

A childhood marred by various forms of hardship, which can be reinforced by trauma as an adult, can profoundly undermine the efforts of someone like Sarah to stabilize her housing situation and her life, says Petering. Treating such underlying factors could go a long way toward helping Sarah, who’s 28, get back on her feet to live a more stable life.

A Broken Family

When Sarah was about 6 years old and her parents were still together, they drove her in their small pickup truck down Washington Boulevard. Her mother and father argued as they approached the large intersection at Sepulveda Boulevard when her father did something to her mother that Sarah has never forgotten: “I remember he reached over and slapped her in the face.”

Karon promptly grabbed her little girl and got out of the car. She and Sarah walked down Sepulveda Boulevard about a mile and a half to Grandma Pat’s house across the street from one of the busiest urban freeways in the country, the 405.

No one ever gave Sarah a clear explanation about how or why it happened, but she was soon separated from her family and admitted into foster care. Even now, 22 years later, Sarah only suspects that her grandmother called the authorities to try to protect the little girl from her home life. 

But Sarah did not end up feeling safer in foster centers or with foster families in the years that followed. She bounced around from home to home as her mother sought to regain custody of her girl and her son, who also did stints in the foster system. Occasionally, Karon would get her kids back, but over the next decade, they would repeatedly pass in and out of foster care. 

“The first home I went to, I remember it was an older disabled woman who was not in it for the right reasons,” Sarah says. The woman would yell out in the middle of the night for Sarah to come turn off her light and her television. “I felt like she was trying to have me there to do things for her” — things the woman just didn’t want to do herself. “I remember being very uncomfortable. I was emotional and in a stranger’s house.”

In the ensuing years, Sarah bounced from home to home for periods of months. This meant repeatedly dealing with changing rules, constantly reassessing her own safety and living without knowing what the future might hold. With no clear future, it is nearly impossible to prepare for it. 

Art on the wall of Grandma Pat’s garage memorializes Chad.

Petering notes that children who grow up in such unstable environments often live unstable lives as grown-ups, partly because they receive little useful guidance on how to become an adult and handle the resulting responsibilities. 

Sarah remembers things in a more palpable way. “Having limited space or sleeping in a room with people you don’t know and you’re coming into a space where they stay is uncomfortable and unsettling,” she explains.

During that tumultuous decade, Sarah lost most of the possessions that held deep symbolic meaning to her. That is why even today Sarah has a desire to retain things in her grandma’s garage since she doesn’t have a personal place to keep the stuff.

Her childhood left deeper scars. With so much instability and so little control over her own life, Sarah struggled with questions of whom she could trust in foster environments rife with theft, bullying and abuse.

When Sarah was around 9 years old, she lived with another foster parent in a home with “cockroaches running around everywhere.” But even in that environment, she began to etch some positive memories, as when she was first able to cook a meal in a foster home. “I made a pasta and zucchini dish that I used to make with my grandma when I stayed with her,” she says. 

But her time in foster care permanently marked Sarah in many ways. It broke her familial connection to food that later left her struggling with her eating, weight and self-esteem, partly because not always knowing when she would have enough food as a child caused her to eat too much when she did. Part of the problem, she recognizes now, is that there was no one around consistently enough to teach her things children typically learn from their parents.

That went far beyond the kitchen or sufficient parental nurturing. During her decade in and out of foster care, she didn’t develop the practical adulting skills that many children gradually pick up from family members as teenagers. This can include handling bureaucratic challenges like filling out applications, balancing a checking account, spending responsibly, filing taxes and making timely credit card payments to avoid high interest rate debt — the sort of things that undermine an applicant in a competitive housing market years or decades later. During Sarah’s childhood, she says, she learned “nothing about financial literacy.” 

At 16, Sarah did learn some basics in an independent living program that she completed through the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services. But it didn’t leave her ready to handle being an adult. The program can be a stepping stone for teenagers before they move into transitional housing, but Sarah’s path went in a different direction. 

Her mother, who had been fighting with various degrees of success to get her children back from the foster system, finally reclaimed full and uninterrupted custody of them both. Karon attempted to rebuild a family life with her children.

Sarah’s dog Titan in her grandmother’s backyard.

For two years, Sarah, her mother and brother seemed to be doing better, with Chad working and contributing to the rent. But then he cut off an ankle bracelet he wore while on house arrest from a probation violation stemming from ditching school. After authorities caught him, he was sent to juvenile hall. This meant the family could no longer afford their Long Beach apartment. So Sarah and Karen moved back in with Sarah’s father in the nearby city of Inglewood. 

When that living situation quickly soured again, Karon went back to the most stable place she knew: Pat’s house in Culver City. Karon settled into the garage, where she has lived amid storage boxes, dog bowls and the like for the last 13 years. During that time, she and the children’s father divorced.

On the cusp of adulthood, Sarah wanted to learn useful things from her mother and contribute at home. “I had chores, like dishes or doing everyone’s laundry,” Sarah says, but she didn’t learn to be a grown-up from her mother.

Petering notes that young people in poverty are expected to grow up much faster than most others, while generally receiving far less guidance. “We know a lot of youth who are 18 and technically an adult, but most of the people in their peer groups have family and peer support to help them navigate and adjust into this complicated world of adulthood, and to get housing through a system that is impossible to navigate. If you have no support while managing school and a job, how can anyone get any of this stuff done?”

On top of such challenges, Sarah was dealing with a mother who suffered from bipolar disorder. Sarah was also beginning to understand that her own mental health struggles sometimes undermined her ability to take the initiative when confronted with problems like finding a solution to her long-standing housing insecurity. “I struggle with depression,” she explains. “Even though I know nothing will just come … to me and I’ve always worked, I wasn’t born into a wealthy family. It’s a constant battle of not having it in me to want to be more proactive about things.”

She did overcome her periodic waves of procrastination to attend nearby West L.A. College, and then transferred to Cal State University at Dominguez Hills, where she majored in sociology and minored in anthropology. During her studies, she discovered how common housing insecurity was among students. She began to speak out on such issues and was surprised to discover that people gave some weight to her childhood experiences with housing insecurity and what she had to say.

More recently, Sarah says that she has been “super diligent” in her search for a home during the three years since she was enrolled in a Rapid Rehousing subsidy program that is supposed to help her afford a place to call home. 

Yet she still has not found a permanent place for herself or a way to resolve problems inside her family. 

Generations of Loss

On the surface, it is clear that Sarah’s difficulties are connected to her trauma, but digging deeper reveals some of its generational roots. 

Her grandma, Pat, had her first child when she was just 14 years old. She had two more children over the next four years with a verbally abusive husband. “By the time I was 18, I had three children and no one to turn to,” Pat explains. She found her way, eventually buying what was then a very affordable house across the street from the decade-old 405 freeway in the mid-1960s.

Since then, the family has been through a lot. Pat divorced her first husband after 21 years. Then, in 1977, her son — Karon’s brother — died in a motorcycle accident. 

Two years later, a childhood friend introduced Pat to Matt Fowler at the La Mirada Inn restaurant in Playa del Rey. “It just clicked,” Pat says. After a courtship that lasted three years, they married and he moved in with her. 

Matt brought much needed laughter to her life and they became inseparable even as Pat spent a lot of time, energy and money trying to help her debilitated daughter Karon and her children.

Pat Fowler and her husband Matt Fowler in their Culver City home.

These days, frustration over money is a recurring issue in the house. Pat asks her granddaughter what she is doing about her car payments and insurance. She has also made it clear that she can’t afford to support Sarah, who seems to understand. “My grandmother has been taking care of my mom her whole life,” she explains.

Pat’s past efforts to co-sign on an apartment for Karon didn’t go well, which is why she refuses to do the same to help stabilize Sarah’s housing situation. “She doesn’t have the patience or finances to put that out there for someone else as well,” Sarah explains.

Patience is in short supply less than a year after Chad’s suicide and with Sarah still uncertain about how to secure housing she can afford.

Sitting on a small sofa in the garage beside her mother with tears still streaming down her face, Sarah pulls up the last photo she has of her brother on her cellphone. It was snapped from across a table at the El Torito in Marina del Rey. 

Karon tearfully explains her ongoing connection to Chad. “I know he’s not here, but he is here,” she says, her hands clasped together in her lap. Chad’s remains fill a bag provided by the crematory that she keeps in the garage where she lives.

Some of the young man’s loved ones would like a portion of his ashes, but Karon is still wrestling with the traumatic loss of her son and isn’t ready to decide whether to divide up his remains or find a permanent home for the purple urn with a hummingbird on it. “I don’t want time to go on without him,” Karon says.

Coming next: Sarah’s family situation further unravels.

All photos by Barbara Davidson.

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