Back in 2006, Deborah Barnes was still working as a landscape designer. Then the floods came that winter, and she found herself “called to the street,” at which point she became a one-woman rescue squad for homeless people who might otherwise have been washed away. She helped pass out tarps, rain gear, socks, and food to hundreds of people. When the rains stopped, Barnes figured life would go back to normal. But the phone calls kept coming. “‘There’s a woman under a bush who’s been beaten up,’” she recalled. “It was endless.”
Her life, she discovered, would never go back to normal. Back then, Barnes was struck by the large number of people who die on the streets. What happens to their stories? Barnes has never been one to let thoughts nag at her without doing something about it. A few months ago, she started a new website — HomelessMemorialofSB.com — to keep track of the people who’ve died homeless and poor in Santa Barbara and to share their stories.
The data, she acknowledged, has been hard to come by. For years, county social service worker Ken Williams tried to keep track of homeless deaths on the wall of a dear friend’s Mesa home, but his list of about 400, Barnes said, is often “sketchy.” Williams died three years ago, and the Mesa house went up for sale — but not before Williams’s friends could copy down all the names from the Mesa wall. Those names now reside on a page of Barnes’s website titled “Ken’s List.”