The heat killed Robert Hunt last summer. But it had help.

It's about 10 in the morning on June 30, 2021, when the cops finally arrive at the New Washington apartment building on West Second Avenue, across from the Big Dipper. Even that early, the apartment is a furnace — with the stagnant air in the hallways soaring to 100 degrees. Hunt had been vomiting the night before.

Looking for witnesses, Spokane Police Officer Josh Stewart knocks on one of the hall's other doors, causing the unlatched door to swing open, revealing a second victim: Andre Pharr is lying on his side on a bare mattress, a box fan blowing full speed at his face. It wasn't enough. The window is only open a crack. There's no air conditioner.

Hunt was 68. Pharr was 36. Both had been recently suffering from dehydration, living in units without sinks or bathrooms. The police chaplain hands the officers bottles of water.

Just 400 feet to the southeast, at the Wolfe Apartments — another complex owned by the same man, Jason Wolfe — another dead body is found less than 36 hours later.

When police enter Deanna Farwell's second-floor unit at the Wolfe, Shannon, the yappy brown-and-black dachshund-Chihuahua mix that Farwell raised from a puppy, is there to greet them. But the dog's owner — the tiny 64-year-old grandmother — is dead, found sitting in a chair in the 97-degree heat.

Between June 26 and July 2, 2021, the Pacific Northwest was hit with an unprecedented heat wave. The National Weather Service called it a "heat dome," and it settled over the region like a blast furnace in the sky and would not budge. For seven days, it was the worst heat wave to hit Spokane in nearly a century, with its highest-ever temperature of 109 set on June 29. Robert Hunt, Andre Pharr and Deanna Farwell all died from that heat, but each had a preexisting condition: deep poverty.

All three died in two apartment buildings that tenants have decried as so beset by pests, disrepair and disorder as to be unlivable. Tenants in both low-income apartment complexes are so used to death, they've built it into their routine.

"If we don't see certain people at least once a day, we go check on them," says Michael Davis, a tenant at the New Washington since 2017.

From May 2016 to August 2021, public records requested and reviewed by the Inlander show that police have found 19 dead bodies in these two apartment buildings. There've been victims of heat — but also victims of heart disease, drug overdoses, emphysema, alcoholism and, in one case, murder.

For all the focus on the hundreds at the Camp Hope encampment or the dozens sleeping on sidewalks in downtown Spokane, life-and-death struggles also unfold behind closed doors in places like the New Washington and Wolfe apartments, with about 70 units combined. They've become the closets where, for decades, Spokane has shoved out of sight some of society's most difficult problems — poverty, mental illness, drug addiction and even sex crimes.

The owner, Wolfe, for all his flaws, has been willing to rent to some tenants almost no one else would — and to offer them a price low enough that almost no one else could match. Last year, Davis' rent went up 8 percent, from $415 to $450, but for Spokane, that price is nearly unbeatable.

And while they're repeatedly referred to as places of "last resort" for struggling tenants before they end up on the street, they're just as often places of first hope — the first apartment some tenants have as they're leaving homelessness.

The trouble is, current and former tenants tell the Inlander, hope can rot into a kind of despair that can kill you.

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"The way things have been there," Davis says, "you never know who's next."

Sometimes Davis says he can feel something in the halls of the New Washington. He'll be in

 the communal kitchen late at night and feel the hairs on the back of his neck stand up without warning.

"I jump and turn — and nobody's there," Davis says. "All the deaths that have been there, sometimes you can get a... presence. You can sense something."

That might sound like a cliche about old buildings being haunted, but to Davis it seems more that, in a place like this, the loss and suffering accumulates like mildew. Death seeps into the floorboards.

And that, as Davis knows firsthand, is not just a metaphor. Back in August 2020, he'd been hired by the New Washington's management to clean and repaint Apartment C9 after the death of its resident directly above his unit.

"I know his name was the same as mine — Michael," he says.

Michael Rizzio, an Army veteran, hadn't been seen for at least four days, and the stage of decomposition suggested he might have been dead even longer.

By the time police found him, his body had turned black and bloated. Fluid bubbles had pooled underneath his arms, ankles and stomach.

"You could look at the floor and see blood and everything was all over the place," Davis says.

Like many of those who die alone in the New Washington, the smell was what alerted tenants to Rizzio's death. Some cops, Spokane Police Chief Craig Meidl tells the Inlander, put a smear of Vicks VapoRub under their noses to mask the stench when dealing with a dead body.

Once Davis lugged out the furniture, the stench grew even stronger.

"Something rotten. Putrid," Davis says. "All the smell settled at the floor. After I got to the floor part, I couldn't do it."

Davis got a mask from the manager's office — one of those cheap COVID masks — but it didn't help. Davis tried to clean in bursts, scraping up the dried blood, retreating when he couldn't stand the stench anymore. They added bleach, trying to kill the bacteria.

"The bleach?" Davis says. "With the dead body fluids? Didn't mix."

In most apartment buildings, professionals — who have the equipment and expertise to deal with the biohazards left by dead bodies — would have taken care of this. But that's usually not how things work here.

By last fall, Davis says, after only four years in the 43-unit apartment complex, he says he knew 10 people who'd died in the New Washington apartments. Like some people can list the presidents in order, Davis can name the tenants who've died in his apartment building.

"One was just out of the blue — that was really weird — was Dennis," Davis says.

Dennis Bernard Michelbook, 62. One of the apartment's other tenants had assaulted Michelbook three days earlier, but it was a methamphetamine overdose that killed him. When the police entered the apartment, mice skittered over a detective's feet.

"Then was Amber," Davis adds.

Amber Raquel Brigman, 33. The sister of Davis' girlfriend at the time. He knows how much Brigman struggled with mental health, how hard her family fought to try to help her.

"There was Sean, who was on A Floor," Davis recalls. "Then Troy. And then Floyd."

Sean Shepherd, 53, collapsed in the shared bathroom. He'd suffered from seizures and had been complaining about leg cramps before he died. Warren Troy Plowden, 54, died of heart disease, exacerbated by meth use. Floyd William Hammond, 70, died in September 2020 on his bed. Empty wine containers were in the trash bin.

"Then the last two, from the heat," Davis says. "Bob and Andre."

Davis doesn't want to go the same way.

"I was not going to be one of those statistics," Davis says. "Up in that damn building, in a room, stiff."

click to enlarge Young Kwak photo The original owner of the Wolfe (below) and New Washington, Linda Wolfe-Dawidjan, was given a Carl Maxey Racial Justice Women of Achievement award in 2003; her son Jason Wolfe now owns both. THE HEAT

At first he tried using fans.

"I had a fan in every direction, one in every corner," Davis says.

In 2019, he lasted that way for about a month, until he couldn't take it anymore. He got an air conditioner for himself, working out a payment plan with a friend.

As recently as 2016, the leases of the New Washington and the Wolfe apartments explicitly banned air conditioners and other items, like fans, from being used at all. The leases don't mention anything about air conditioners today.

But owner Jason Wolfe, in a brief interview, says that, today, when it gets hot, air conditioners are encouraged — though he wants tenants to get permission first — and he doesn't charge extra for electricity.

"We always go up there and tell them when the heat is high, that they need to get fans, air conditioning or go down to some of these cooling centers," Wolfe says.

Wolfe suggests downtown itself plays a big part of the problem.

"The entire downtown is covered in asphalt, concrete, bricks, and it retains even more heat," Wolfe says. "If it's 80 at your house, it's 90 downtown."

But the building itself could also have contributed to the deaths during last year's heat wave: Old buildings with little in the way of insulation can trap heat overnight, particularly in small rooms with windows that have trouble opening and closing. The buildings didn't have fans in the hallways, much less central air. And without sinks in the room, dehydration was that much easier.

The tenants themselves were also particularly vulnerable. The average lifespan of a chronically homeless person, according to the National Coalition for the Homeless, is only 50. Many tenants here spent big chunks of their lives homeless.

The issue is psychological as much as physical, says longtime homelessness activist Dave Bilsland.

"They get so depressed, they don't want to go do anything," Bilsland says. "You don't have the sense to get the hell out. You're going to sit there and die."

A witness told police that Pharr had broken down in tears the day before his death, possibly lamenting the death of his mother.

These tragedies ripple outward. New Washington tenant Talisa Buffington died of an overdose in 2018, leaving her 1-year-old child to grow up without her birth mother.

Deanna Farwell had 11 granddaughters. One of them, Brittany Trembley, got married on June 27, 2021, and desperately wanted her grandma to be at her wedding. But Farwell didn't have money for transportation. Four days later, Farwell died in the Wolfe.

"The first three months, I couldn't go through her things," Trembley says.

Even Shannon, Farwell's little dog, didn't make it to Christmas, Trembley says. She thinks the dog was too depressed about the death of her owner — didn't want to drink, didn't want to eat.

Now Trembley's wedding anniversary is forever associated with her grandma's death, and when the one-year mark hit earlier this summer the weight of her grandma's loss hit all over again.

"I feel her death was preventable," she says.

Especially now in a housing crisis, for many finding a place to live — any place — can be a long, hard road. Vicki Anderson, who moved into her apartment at the Wolfe with her then-teenage son Justice in 2017, recalls that feeling of accomplishment that comes with lining up a new place.

"I'm proud of myself. I got my boy a place to go. I accomplished something," Vicki Anderson recalls feeling. "I sit down on the blanket... All of a sudden I felt something crawling on me."

Bedbugs. And there were cockroaches, spiders and mice, too. For anyone struggling with addiction, like Vicki, it was hardly the best place to quit.

"We would walk down the walkways, and there would be people just, like, passed out on the floor with needles next to them," Justice recalls. "It was obvious they were doing dope."

Police reports, meanwhile, show that the apartments were rife with mental illness — at times, police wrote, some tenants didn't seem to understand the questions officers were asking or met them with a blank stare.

"Nobody warned you how many crazy people were there," Vicki says.

Both Justice and Vicki Anderson recall being disturbed by seeing a man holding an ice cream cone filled with feces in the hallway.

Social science researchers say that some types of mental illness, when combined with drug addictions, can manifest in violence. Yet they also caution that people with mental illness are much more likely to be victimized by violence than those without mental illness.

Just weeks after Wilbur Tankersley, a man with schizophrenia, got a room at the Wolfe, in 2020, he was murdered during a confrontation with another tenant.

Anderson herself says she had her own mental breakdown while living at the Wolfe — she ended up at what she calls the "crazy house" at Sacred Heart Medical Center.

"Living there really messed with your mental health," Anderson says of the Wolfe. "I wouldn't even send my worst enemy there."

Jose Trejo, attorney with the Northwest Justice Project, a legal aid program, says there have been many complaints about places like the Wolfe and the New Washington in the past. But most tenants haven't wanted to mount a formal legal challenge unless they had someplace else to go. They didn't want to risk retaliation.

The alternative — homelessness — is brutal, as Monica Tittle knows.

"I've been assaulted. I saw a man's eye get put out," Tittle says, describing her time spent homeless. "You learn to sleep during the day if you're female."

So when she was able to use Goodwill's Housing and Essential Need program funds to get an apartment at the New Washington in 2017, she jumped at it. But she quickly learned why there were spots available.

"My door wouldn't even close completely," Tittle says. "It wouldn't shut. Nothin'. It wouldn't latch. It would just pop open."

If Davis was out in the hall, he could sometimes hear the scraping and screeching sound from Tittle's room as she dragged an entertainment center cabinet — furniture left behind by a prior occupant — to block the door to protect herself at night.

She had a good reason to be worried. She had dated a domestic abuser, with a long record of violence and threats. On New Year's Eve, on the last day of 2017, she says he attacked her.

"I got up to go to the bathroom, early in the morning, I opened the door, he was standing there," says Tittle, who told police that her former boyfriend clutched her throat and pushed her to the bed.

"He would grab me by the larynx so hard, I couldn't get air in or out," she tells the Inlander. "If I wanted to speak or I needed anything, I needed to raise my hand."

She also tells police that the man punched her in the face, in the back of the head. She tells them she passed out at some point, but that he told her "if I made a single sound, he'd kill me."

But after hours, she had a chance to escape. He let her go to the bathroom by herself, and she bolted for her neighbor Amber Brigman's room — when Brigman was still alive — where she finally was able to call 911.

Her assailant was arrested. Tittle got a restraining order. And she went further — she went to City Hall. Late, after a City Council meeting, she shared her account of experiencing assault at the New Washington with then-Councilwoman Kate Burke and her assistant.

"She was shaken to the core," Burke recalls. "It made a woman's already extended trauma from being houseless even more traumatic."

And when Tittle described the conditions of her apartment, how her doors didn't even lock, Burke felt that was something she could address. She and her council assistant organized an expedition of city staffers, council members and assistants, and nonprofit employees, to walk through the New Washington apartments in February of 2018.

Ceiling tiles were missing. A big hole in the bathroom floor had been crudely covered with plywood. Open wires were sticking out of outlets. A Vietnam vet told them he'd lived in the unit for a month, in midwinter, without heat or electricity.

Spokane code enforcement supervisor Luis Garcia concluded the units "would not meet the minimum provisions established in a property maintenance code," citing the lack of sanitary facilities. But it also wasn't wasn't bad enough that the city would be forced to shut it down, he said.

It wasn't the first time the city had received a slew of complaints about the New Washington — and it wouldn't be the last.

click to enlarge Daniel Walters photo Monica Tittle marched down to City Hall in 2018, blowing the whistle on conditions in her New Washington apartment. FIGHTING BACK

Simultaneously, two other tenants were waging a similar war from the inside.

A week after James Murray and Michael Hanson moved into the New Washington apartments in December 2017, Murray sent the city Code Enforcement staff an extensive complaint about the building.

"Entire building is horribly disgusting," he wrote, describing the lack of heat, perpetually clogged toilets and sinks, and the pest infestations, only to get bounced around from department to department without accomplishing anything.

So the same day that Burke and other officials toured the New Washington, Murray and Hanson filed a lawsuit, suing owner Jason Wolfe over the "third-world, unsafe, and unsanitary" living conditions, and naming the city for allowing them.

The details sprawl across multiple pages: Water pours into the building through a large hole in the roof when it rains, they wrote. The frame on their door was basically nonexistent from having been kicked in so many times. He could see "used needles, human excrement and trash" thrown by other tenants on the roof outside.

Garcia worried that without power, the smoke detector wouldn't work and the gaping holes between the floors in the building could allow a fire to rapidly spread from floor to floor. Murray warned that he had one only exit from his hallway and that shoddy electrical work had increased the fire risk.

All this fretting wasn't just theoretical.

Six months later, the tenant in the unit directly next to where Hanson and Murray had lived — a sex offender with mental health and drug abuse issues — became angry that he was being evicted and vowed revenge. At 1 am on July 28, 2018, he stuck his cigarette lighter on his bedsheet and set it on fire.

Back in 1999, an arson at downtown's Mars Hotel and Casino had consumed the entire Fairmont apartment complex next door. Without power or heat, the pipes at the Mars had burst, so the sprinklers at the Mars wouldn't work. The ensuing inferno spread to the housing next door, leaving 108 low-income tenants homeless.

But in 2018 the New Washington did have working fire sprinklers, and despite all the other deferred maintenance, the fire sprinklers did work on that July night.

"The fire sprinklers saved the building," the arson investigator wrote.

Trejo, the Northwest Justice Project attorney, took over the lawsuit on behalf of Murray and Hanson. And, ultimately, he gives credit to Wolfe — there were some significant improvements made, like some of the big holes being plugged up.

"Everything was going good, we'd remodeled a whole bunch of stuff," Wolfe says.

But then COVID hit. "They told us we were not allowed to evict. We had to sit there and let people not pay rent," Wolfe says. "For over two years, I had over 20 people that just refused to pay."

And at the end of the eviction moratorium, the rules had changed to make evictions more expensive and time-consuming.

"We had to pay to get these people out," Wolfe says. And that meant raising rents.

There have been some reforms. Goodwill tells the Inlander they've instituted a new inspection process through their Housing and Essential Need program — ensuring housing quality before they're able to subsidize new tenants in apartment complexes like the New Washington or the Wolfe.

But ultimately, the reason these two apartment buildings have been so affordable is because they've been awful places to live. If they were better, rents would be higher or there would be heavy competition for available spots. It's economics, brutal but simple.

The good news is, if you look up at those windows at the Wolfe and New Washington apartments today, you see the windows speckled with air conditioners.

The Inlander asks Tittle and Davis if they think it'd be better if the Wolfe and New Washington apartments were just parking lots.

They answer in unison: "Yeah."

But the problem is obvious. The number of residents at Camp Hope — a homeless encampment in Spokane — has continued to explode in size, from roughly 100 residents to over 600 by July. Trembley, the granddaughter of the woman who died of heat exposure in the Wolfe, says she knows families who've ended up there due to the high costs of rent.

But there's a reason even Burke, who was often more than happy to mount quixotic crusades on behalf of the poor and the homeless on council, didn't fight to tear the New Washington or Wolfe down. There's nowhere for the displaced to go.

Last year, Tacoma's KNKX Public Radio managed to figure out what happened to some of the residents who were displaced when the Merkle Hotel — the last single-room occupancy apartment complex left in Tacoma — shuttered its doors in 2018. Of the 12 former tenants tracked down, five had already died.

In the last decade, it's not that a ton of the housing for the extremely low-income has disappeared, says Jonathan Mallahan, vice president of housing for Catholic Charities of Eastern Washington.

"The number of people housed successfully has gone up fantastically since the 2000s," says Mallahan. Just in the last 11 years, he notes, Catholic Charities and other nonprofits have built more than 600 units of "permanent supportive housing," low-income housing for chronically homeless individuals and families.

The problem is that homelessness, thanks to Spokane's lack of available housing overall, is skyrocketing far faster. So is the severity of homelessness: Goodwill is seeing people with a far greater array of serious issues than before.

Still, Catholic Charities is hoping to buy the Quality Inn on Sunset Hill and turn it into 87 apartments, coupled with its own team of therapists, doctors, cooks and employment service staffers — aiming to help exactly the sort of people who have struggled at the Wolfe and the New Washington.

"We're going to have like 30 people out at this one site working with these 100 residents to help them move forward in their lives," Mallahan says.

But even that has sparked a flurry of neighborhood opposition — furious residents who are horrified at the impacts of Spokane's widespread homelessness and believe building supportive housing for them in their area will just make things worse.

Some have found better housing. Tittle — who says she was booted from her apartment after giving Burke and others a tour — is now living in the Ridpath, where she finally has her own air conditioner. Things are better. Others, like Davis, are still looking, worrying what happens if they lose their subsidies and end up back on the streets.

"What am I going to do?" he told the Inlander last year. "I can't go back out there."

But for 19 former tenants of the Wolfe and the New Washington, it's too late. When the Inlander mentions the name of Gary Collins, 56, the news that he died last year in his room at the Wolfe devastates Vicki Anderson, a former tenant of the Wolfe.

"Gary was the only decent person there," she says through tears. "He used to ride the train. He would tell me stories about riding the train."

One tenant told police that Collins was only a day away from moving out. But Anderson says that Collins always believed, never giving up hope that things were about to turn around.

"Gary would always say he was going to move out," Anderson says. "But he didn't have money to move out, and they knew it." ♦

The original print version of this article was headlined "Death at the Door"

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