Couple who were run over as they slept chose each other over housing
Even though she sleeps in a spot surrounded by busy roads, Melissa Fay flinches whenever tires screech.
It’s been that way since a car veered off the road and plowed over a couple sleeping under the overpass across from her, crushing them. Fay saw it happen.
“When I close my eyes at night, I’m literally having to take Tylenol pills to knock myself out,” she said. “I hear tires screeching and all I see is that car. And people.”
Michelle Beach and Eugene Stroman died under the wheels
of a 2002 Lexus on Sept. 25, killed as they slept next to their two dogs and grocery cart of possessions at the intersection of the Sam Houston Tollway and West Beechnut in southwest Houston. The driver was arrested and charged with failure to stop and render aid.
Beach had just turned 50. Stroman was 59. Beach left two parents and four siblings. Stroman left a daughter and four grandchildren.
The couple died in a freak incident, but they were vulnerable because of where they slept. In that sense, being homeless killed them.
Others face similar risks. Studies have shown that homeless people are more likely to be crime victims and suffer more severe health problems. The chronically homeless have a lower life expectancy than the housed by around 30 years.
Beach and Stroman faced circumstances that were typical among the other 1,500 people experiencing unsheltered homelessness in Harris County. Beach dealt with severe mental illness, mostly untreated. Arrests in the 1980s and early 1990s and a stint in prison for drugs limited Stroman’s access to jobs and apartments. One rent hike by Stroman’s landlord left him unable to stay in his southwest Houston apartment, pushing him to live in his car and ultimately on the streets.
The two were well-known advocates in the community: Beach rescued dogs from abusive owners, and Stroman was one of the public faces of an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit challenging the city of Houston’s anti-encampment ordinance.
When Fay logged in to Facebook and read stories about her friends’ deaths, she saw comments suggesting the driver shouldn’t be charged at all. Thinking about it makes her cry.
“Society makes me so mad,” she said. “So what, they were homeless? They’re people.”
‘If she says the sky is blue’
Growing up, Christy Beach didn’t recognize her eldest sister’s mental illness. To Christy, seven years younger, Michelle was the sister who held her hand on the way to school, got all A’s and was a whiz at languages. She stuck up for her four younger siblings when kids picked on them on the playground.
Nearly every year brought a new playground. The five Beach siblings moved all around Sioux City, Iowa, because their parents couldn’t quite afford to keep up with housing costs. Their father worked in factories but hurt his back; both parents picked up as many odd jobs as they could.
It fell to Michelle Beach to babysit. She taught Christy how to swim and told her siblings stories to lull them to sleep. Sometimes the stories veered out of control.
“She lied like nothing else,” Christy Beach said. “We used to have a saying — if she says the sky is blue, you better go check because it’s probably gray.”
At 15, Michelle Beach was diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and sent to an inpatient facility in Iowa. She ran away from it.
That was the last time Beach got a real attempt at treatment and the first time she was homeless. Six months later, she moved back in with their parents — and she was pregnant.
Beach had her four children within six years. A breakup with her boyfriend during her fourth pregnancy was hard on her. Her mental health spiraled. Social services stepped in.
Christy Beach remembers her mother, frustrated, snapping at the social workers, “I don’t care what I have to do; even if I have to kill you, I’ll take those kids back.”
The kids ended up in state custody. Beach ended up on the streets for the second time. The last image the Beach family saw of the children was a Christmas card from their adoptive family. The oldest was 6 or 7, the youngest was about a year. Christy Beach thought they were probably better off.
In her mid-20s, Beach moved to Texas with a boyfriend. The relationship didn’t last, but she stayed in the area. The family heard from her every six months or so. Her mother sent money when she could, but Beach never asked for help.
Sept. 19 — Beach’s 50th birthday — came and went. She didn’t respond to any birthday wishes. The family figured she might be homeless again.
Then, Christy Beach got a call from one of her brothers. Their cousins had gotten a strange email, asking them to claim the body of Michelle Beach.
She thought it was a hoax.
‘The Mansion of Wheeler’
Under the bridge at what was known as Houston’s Wheeler encampment in Midtown, Stroman was known as the bicycle man.
Everyone — lawyers, bike messengers, other people in the camp — stopped by if a chain came loose or if their wheel went sideways. Stroman, always good with his hands, tinkered as Beach watched.
Stroman — Gene to anyone who knew him — took a path toward homelessness that began like many others: a run-in with the criminal justice system. He had struggled with drugs and was arrested multiple times beginning in the 1980s. He was in and out of prison for about 15 years for drug possession and parole violations.
By the late 2000s, his life had stabilized. He had a job as a janitor and a two-bedroom apartment. And by March 2013, according to their Facebook pages, he had Beach.
But Stroman’s landlord raised the rent. His salary couldn’t keep up. He tried to switch to a one-bedroom. It didn’t work out.
Instead of facing a formal eviction — which would have made it even harder for him to get an apartment in the future — he left before he could fall behind on rent. He lived in his car until he had to sell that, too. He lost his job and couldn’t find another. He suspected it was because of his record.
Homelessness made getting a job even harder: Stroman had no transportation and couldn’t wash his clothes. He managed to find a job for a time at a convenience store by the Wheeler encampment. But in Houston — where a minimum-wage worker needs to work 112 hours a week to afford a two-bedroom apartment in 2019, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition — it paid only for food, not rent.
Shere Dore, a homeless advocate who was briefly homeless herself in 2012, met the couple in 2015. They were living in a tent city in Midtown where Dore was doing outreach.
Stroman and Beach had carved out a space for themselves that Dore nicknamed “the Mansion of Wheeler.” Their tent fit five. Beach refurbished wooden crates into fences and attached lights to the tent’s trim. They had chairs, a table and a couch outside.
Beach was the outgoing one. When she was making her rounds with her grocery cart, she hunted for items for others. She always had dogs.
Stroman preferred to follow football on the radio and talk about current events. Mostly, he and Dore talked about local issues, such as Mayor Sylvester Turner’s homelessness policies.
“I think at the end of the day, Gene wanted to be seen as a human being, as a man,” Dore said. “Not a homeless man, not some guy who’s down on his luck, but on a human level.”
Like Dore, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer was drawn to the couple when she was interviewing people at Wheeler. Stroman agreed to become one of the named plaintiffs in the ACLU’s 2017 lawsuit against the city.
Stroman advocated for the homeless on a smaller level. Karen Carter, one of his three sisters, didn’t understand at first how her smart brother had wound up homeless. But she visited him every Sunday. They sat on buckets under the bridge, Carter dressed in her church best and talked about what life was like.
“He said some people would rather remain homeless than go home to a person that beats them. They all have different reasons,” she said. “I was stereotyping everyone.”
Stroman got housing around October 2017 through a city voucher program after a failed attempt the year before, according to his declaration in the lawsuit. The ACLU is no longer involved in the case, and the Wheeler encampment was removed in 2018.
At one point, the two were in different homes, Dore said. But then Stroman had a stroke. He already had a heart condition and had suffered two heart attacks. After the stroke, he had trouble using his left side.
“She told me at one point she was going to stay with Gene,” Dore said. “She was not going to let him just live alone and have to try to survive on his own.”
Dore last saw Beach the second week in September, when Dore was downtown giving out food to the homeless. Beach had purple streaks and purple braids in her hair.
Before she left, with enough food for herself and Stroman,
Beach promised she’d get him well enough to come downtown and surprise Dore.
“Love ya, sis,” Beach called. “I said, ‘Love you too,’ ” Dore said. “And that we’ll see her soon.”
Back on the street
By the accounts of their loved ones, Stroman and Beach both ended their lives homeless because they didn’t want to be apart.
The story family members gathered in the days after they died goes like this: Beach had moved in with Stroman to take care of them. But she was not on his lease and not supposed to be living with him. Instead of living without her, he chose to leave with her.
Around Sept. 17, friends and family members said, the couple was homeless.
Eight days later, they were dead. Karen Carter last saw her brother at his apartment on Sept. 14. As usual, they took a picture together. Carter posted it to her Facebook page that day. Stroman, half a head taller and sporting blue plastic sunglasses and a baseball cap with a lime green bill, leaned into his sister.
“Whenever we leave, I’d tell him I loved him, and he’d tell me he loved me,” she said. “That particular day for some reason, I didn’t tell him.”
The crash
Melissa Fay and her husband were settling in for a movie night on Sept. 25 on their makeshift bed under the Sam Houston Tollway.
They had their makeshift TV stand, a propped-up phone, ready and popcorn out. The new couple on the corner across the intersection were tucked into their sleeping bags, dogs by their sides. Fay and her husband were watching the latest installment of “The Fast and the Furious” when a black car whipped down the street toward the Burger King.
The driver cut the wheel and the car skidded under the overpass.
It ran off the road and up the embankment. It crushed Beach and Stroman.
Fay and her husband scrambled to call the police. Her friend ran over to the man screaming, “Do you know what you just
Fay had met them just a few days earlier. She and Beach bonded over an exchange of dog treats, Whoppers from Burger King and stories of how they wound up on that particular corner.
Police arrested the driver, Jordache Lenton. He was charged with two felony counts of failure to stop and render aid. Fay wishes he had been charged with more.
Her friend, the one who yelled at Lenton, had looked under the car and saw what had become of Beach and Stroman. She didn’t look, and she doesn’t want to know.
When she first saw Beach, Fay had noticed her holding a cardboard sign she could barely read across the intersection. So she got sparkly black poster board and pink letters to make Beach a new sign. It was drying when Beach was killed.
“The next day, she was supposed to be out, holding up her pretty sign to make money,” Fay said. She started to cry. “But instead, she was in a morgue.”
‘It’s never enough’
Stroman’s daughter once asked him what his one wish was. Stroman, Carter said, told her niece that he wanted a place for homeless people to shower and wash their clothes.
“If you haven’t had a bath in seven days and your clothes aren’t clean, you can’t get a job,” she said. “I talked to my niece and I said we need to fix it so there can be a building with washers and dryers and showers for people that are homeless.”
They want to find a way to build that place. They’ll call it “Eugene’s Dream.” Similar facilities have been established in Los Angeles and discussed in Houston.
Stroman’s daughter tried to get him to come home with her. But he didn’t want to be a burden on her and the kids. And he knew Beach could be difficult, and he wouldn’t leave Beach.
Christy Beach, the youngest of Michelle’s remaining siblings, is a mental health associate. She went into her field because of her family. She sees her patients getting treated and wonders why Michelle never got that kind of help.
“I wish somebody would’ve seen the series of events as the years went by and the problems that she had and noticed that she needed more help than what she was getting,” she said. “Mental illness really doesn’t have the help it needs in this world.”
Christy blames herself.
“I want to help my family, and I do help my family, but it’s never enough,” she said.