Woman found in her room after 7 weeks
Feb 17, 2010, Vol: 17, No: 8
The women who knew India Valdez say she was the mother they never had.
Most days she sat in a chair in the entryway of downtown Seattle’s old YWCA building at Fifth Avenue and Seneca Street, saying hello to her fellow tenants as they passed, asking about their day or making a fuss over the occasional grandchildren who came through the door for a visit.
For the women who live in the building’s rooms – most poor or retired, many of them alone in the world – she was a maker of meals and a shoulder to cry on, a fixture in a bright kaftan who lived up to her nickname. She was “Big Mama.”
For her friends and the staff of the YWCA, which is dedicated to providing low-cost housing for women in need, the discovery of India Valdez’s decomposed body on Jan. 14, roughly seven weeks after her death, has rocked the very foundations of the building: No woman, no human being should end up like that, they say.
And, yet, three tenants and a former resident of the building say, it has happened before. On Jan. 26, residents presented a petition to YWCA management calling for new procedures that would prompt staff to reply more quickly whenever a resident goes missing.
When Valdez was not at her usual spot the day after Thanksgiving, say the tenants – who asked that their names be withheld out of concern for their housing – they noticed it immediately. As the days went by and Valdez still did not appear, they became concerned and went to staff to request a room check, in part, says one, because Valdez suffered from diabetes and a heart condition.
In early December, two residents did get a staff member to go to Valdez’s room, unlock the door and look in. But all she did, the tenants say, was visually scan the room and lock up again, even though Valdez’s television was on.
On Jan. 14, after she and others persisted in telling staff that something was wrong, the YWCA made the decision to call the police and file a missing person’s report, says Cathy MacCaul, the agency’s associate director of community affairs. “We did not feel that we had the right to go into her room and search,” MacCaul says, “so the police went in thinking they were going to look for additional information on where she went or how to contact family.”
What the police found, according to their incident report, was the television still playing, a fan running and India Valdez’s body lying in the space between her bed and a wall. Though she was decaying, an open window beside her had carried away the smell.
“It was pretty startling, pretty shocking,” says MacCaul, who works in the eight-story building, the YWCA’s Seattle headquarters. “When we heard about it, it was a very emotional time just to know something like that had happened.”
The King County Medical Examiner’s Office says Valdez, who was in her late 60s or early 70s and had worked as a nurse, died of natural causes on or around Dec. 1, but it’s unclear, her friends say, how long she might have been lying on the floor incapacitated before she died.
On Feb. 8, the residents held a meeting with the building’s management and proposed a number of procedures that staff could adopt to avoid similar tragedies. In addition to creating a “buddy system” in which one resident might be authorized by another to request a staff room check after a certain number of days, residents are asking that staff be more thorough when searching a room, including looking in closets or any other space that could contain a body.
They are also asking that rooms be thoroughly cleaned and painted after a death and that residents be allowed to conduct a ritual to spiritually cleanse the room.
MacCaul says the YWCA is considering the proposals and other measures, but most residents have told the agency that they don’t want staff constantly checking on them or knocking on their doors – a desire for privacy, she says, that the YWCA wants to respect. The tenants say the agency has taken that policy too far, however, and shouldn’t allow women to lie dead for weeks on end, especially, they say, when there’s an overpowering odor that is obvious and indecent to the living and the dead.
MacCaul says she has talked with staff at the building, some of whom have worked 20 years for the YWCA, and, to their knowledge, there have been no other circumstances like Valdez’s. But the three tenants and former resident and YWCA employee NaaSira Adeeba cite several deaths.
Before she moved out of the building in 2005, Adeeba says, she would visit a friend on the sixth floor, where there was an odor that was “just beyond wanting to ingest,” she says. The friend also told Adeeba that she had been finding maggots in her room. “It was very rough,” Adeeba says, when paramedics finally removed the decomposed body of a woman who lived next door.
In late 2006, the women say, the remains of another sixth-floor tenant whom staff believed was on vacation would be found by an inspector who entered the unit to test the smoke alarm.
In November of 2007, another friend of Adeeba’s – Mayonne Coakienos, a retired nurse – was found dead in her room three days after a trip and fall on the sidewalk. Though the 64-year-old Coakienos had a son, Adeeba says, it’s unclear if he ever knew of her death. Her ashes were laid to rest by King County in a burial service held in March 2009 for 209 indigents.
This past Christmas, Julia Rawlings, 51, was found dead in her room on a Monday after exhibiting strange behavior the previous Friday. She had been walking around the halls in a tank-top and underwear, a friend says, and looked ill.
In each case, building staff shared no information about the circumstances or cause of death, leaving an unexplained hole in residents’ lives, the tenants say. Adeeba used to work as a YWCA counselor helping abused women and says the deaths are very sad.
“For these women that are lying dead and nobody gives a crap, something’s wrong with that,” Adeeba says. “It’s a kind of door opener that we really do need to develop our sisterhood.”
<< Back to Article Details