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Two homeless people say they lost everything they owned in an Interstate 5 encampment sweep that a lawyer has warned could lead to a lawsuit if the state’s transportation department continues to dispose of personal belongings.

Darcie Day and her husband, Merlyn Parker, say they had secured their packs and sleeping bags under a tarp below the freeway’s James Street overpass the morning of Jan. 13. When they returned to the site around 1:30 p.m., they found a work crew in orange vests loading their belongings and those of others into a truck.

The two, who are both Real Change vendors, say they approached a worker and asked if they could retrieve any of their belongings and were told no. They asked how they could get their belongings later and were given no information, says Day, who says she was camping at the site with her husband while waiting for a room she has been promised by the YWCA.

The couple says the crew removed three tarps, four sleeping bags, her day pack and his large backpack, in which they had stored their medicine, medical coupons, identification, Social Security cards and other papers, including Day’s application for the YWCA.

The Seattle maintenance superintendent for the Washington State Department of Transportation says the crew found no personal belongings at the site and that the garbage loaded into the truck that day went straight to the dump.

A driver who passed the scene on Jan. 13 called Real Change and said the workers were carrying belongings to the truck such as a red, roller-wheel suitcase that he saw — items that a WSDOT policy calls for the agency to itemize and store for 70 days.

The policy, “WSDOT’s Guidelines to Address Illegal Encampments within State Right of Way,” was created in consultation with the Seattle-King County Coalition on Homelessness in 2008 after a WSDOT contractor killed a homeless man in Seattle with a brush-clearing tractor.

In a letter sent to the agency last week, Anita Khandelwal, an attorney with The Defenders Association, cites the policy and its definition of personal belongings, which include “sleeping bags, tents, stoves and cooking utensils, lanterns, flashlights, bed rolls, tarps, foam, canvas, mats, blankets, pillows, medication ... luggage, backpacks or other storage containers.”

WSDOT must post a removal notice at a site at least 72 hours in advance, the guidelines say. After that, “personal items that are not refuse, contaminated, illegal, or hazardous shall be placed in large transparent plastic bags,” the policy states, “inventoried to include the date, location and [a] brief description” and stored for 70 days, with WSDOT to make efforts to locate the owner within the first 10.

Day and Parker say they did see a green sheet of paper duct-taped to a freeway support. The “State of Washington Notice and Order to Remove,” which they retrieved from the site, gives the date and time the warning was posted as Jan. 8 at 10:50 a.m. and includes a phone number to call for more information. But the two say they moved their belongings away from the sign believing that would be sufficient.

Regardless of their error, Khandelwal says, the agency failed to store the couple’s belongings. “WSDOT’s destruction of property in violation of its own guidelines renders it liable to suit,” her letter to the agency states.

Maintenance Superintendent Jim McBride says it’s up to the crew, however, to decide what to keep and what to save and that, if there were any packs under a tarp at the James Street site, the Department of Corrections work-release crew that WSDOT hired to do the actual clearing could have hauled the whole pile to the truck without realizing it contained any belongings.

WSDOT and its DOC crews spend about two days a week clearing up to three camps a day, McBride says. A WSDOT supervisor always oversees the work and looks for personal belongings, but none were found off the James Street exit on Jan. 13 and no one asked the supervisor to get anything, he says.

“Our goal in our cleanup operations is to try and protect and preserve personal items that are deemed salvageable to our employees,” McBride says. But, “That can obviously be construed as subjective by whoever is making the determination.”

“If sleeping bags or tents are clean and free of mud, filth and human excrement, they would make an attempt to keep them,” he says. But crews are told not to put their hands inside dirty tents or sleeping bags, he says, so as not to risk contact with needles or other hazardous items.

Any wet or soiled bedding is “considered garbage and it gets thrown away,” he says. Items from other clearings have been saved at a Seattle storage site, he says, but no one has ever come there to claim anything.

The red suitcase seen in the back of the truck, McBride says, could have come from another camp clearing that the DOC crew might have performed that day for another agency, or it may have been picked up off the freeway.

Day and Parker have since acquired a few blankets and sleeping bags to keep them warm at night, but say they’re out about $300 worth of camping gear.

“I feel like we were taken advantage of,” Day says. “If we were there to get our stuff, why couldn’t we get it?”

Alison Eisinger, executive director of the Seattle-King County Coalition on Homelessness, says it’s a troubling question, especially when people have no place else to go. “Destroying people’s personal property and survival items makes them more poor and more vulnerable. It doesn’t make them less homeless,” she says. “It’s wrong, plain and simple.”

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