Whatever happened to Tebayane Rose?

Woman's story illustrates challenges of resolving homelessness

Last April I wrote a story about 69-year-old Tebayane Rose who — after a car accident that caused a traumatic brain injury; the loss of her business as a roofing contractor and the deaths of her mother and sister — was living with her dog in her Jeep after the coronavirus pandemic eliminated her employment possibilities.

The response from readers to Rose’s heartbreaking plight was immediate and generous. A Go Fund Me account set up by her social worker and therapist, Kathleen Coty, raised nearly $6,000; private donors contributed more than $4,000 more, as well as clothes, gas cards, gift cards, dog food and even dental work.

Recently, Rose contacted me again, claiming she had not received the money raised on her behalf and was now on the verge of homelessness again. She said she had reported both Coty and the primary private donor, Bob Thorpe, to the police for fraud, contacted media outlets, and posted on the online forum Next Door in an effort to expose the deception.

Needless to say, I was alarmed and concerned.. After all, I’d played a key role in exposing her story and felt certain I hadn’t misjudged the intentions or character of Coty or the many donors involved in the effort to find her permanent housing.

I told Rose I was no longer with the paper, but that I would try to research what had happened. Then I reached out to the Palmetto Police Department investigating the charges of fraud, as well as to Coty and Thorpe, who told a very different story.

Just after I wrote my story, donations began pouring in to the Go Fund Me account and directly to Coty, who agreed to keep everything in a business account since Rose had no bank account or her own and had conceded an inability to handle finances. Thorpe, who’d read my story, stepped up to offer more than $2,000 in cash to put Rose and her dog, Tavi, in a hotel for the first month until a more permanent solution could be found.

Rose refused the longer-term placement she was offered through the county’s “housing first” portal for the homeless because it involved a roommate and Rose insisted she needed to live alone. (Coty concedes it was substandard and a less than ideal placement.) When Thorpe took Rose to look at a fully-furnished unit attached to the back of a house in Gillespie Park, she rejected it the moment she crossed the threshold, complaining it smelled of mold.

“That should have been my first red flag,” said Thorpe. ”She told me she wanted to find a trailer in the countryside where she could live alone.”

Rose did find a dilapidated trailer in Palmetto and approved it for purchase after performing the inspection herself (she still had her inspector’s license). Since her credit issues and low income (she receives about $800 a month in Social Security) did not qualify her to purchase the trailer herself, Thorpe bought it for $13,000. Subsequently, he spent almost $6,000 more on a new air conditioning unit and plumbing repairs. He also continued to foot the bill for the lot rent and utilities, which came to about $800 a month.

Coty sent me several pages of spread sheets accounting for each purchase made for Rose and the trailer from the account containing the $9,700 raised by the Go Fund Me and from donors. They include several reimbursements to herself for larger items she had to put on her own credit card because Rose did not have one. Each transaction is dated and documented precisely and in detail.

The goal was to work toward Rose gaining independence and taking over the trailer payments before the donated funds ran out. But Coty made clear the ongoing support was contingent on three things: That Rose remain in treatment with Coty; that she apply for jobs and other forms of government assistance; and that she meet occasionally to discuss financial stability and ongoing fundraising efforts with Coty and Thorpe.

According to Coty, in October Rose refused to agree to meet, asked Coty to close the Go Fund Me account and stop fundraising efforts and said she was terminating her therapy relationship with Coty..

After informing Rose that the donated monies would run out in February, Coty and Thorpe gave her a week to come up with an alternative plan. When no such plan was forthcoming, Thorpe said he had no choice but to have a lawyer begin eviction proceedings. By the time Rose asked if she could pay rent instead, Thorpe says, “I said no, this chapter was over in my life.” A court hearing was conducted by Zoom.

“I said to the judge, if anyone thinks I wanted to end up where I am now with this situation, they’re crazy,” says Thorpe, who says his expenditures, including legal feels, are close to $25,000. “All I was ever trying to do was help.”

An investigation by the Palmetto police into Rose’s charges of fraud found no validity to the claims.

On November 16, Coty sent Rose a letter saying “all the funds from the Go Fund Me online campaign have been expended on your behalf,” adding that, on receipt of a written request by mail, she would disperse the remaining balance of private donations — just over $1,500 — “directly to companies that meet requirements for your care … due to your self-reported inability to handle funds.”

When I contacted Rose again this week, she responded with a half dozen text messages, asking why I had contacted Coty and Thorpe, wanting to know their responses and saying she had thought I was not interested in her story.

When I assured her I was very much interested and would be happy to share everything I knew if she’d just give me a call, she texted: “I’m interested in telling the truth as well as you should be.”

The last text I received did not answer to my final request for an interview, but asked me to send a link to my article once it was published.

This whole episode has left me with a heavy heart. It would be easy to assign blame, judge by hindsight or turn this into a cautionary tale about “no good deed going unpunished.”

But the truth is, everyone involved — from me writing the story; to Coty going above and beyond as a therapist; to Thorpe and all the donors who gave so generously; to Tebayane herself, a smart, capable woman whom life has dealt a very difficult hand — entered into this collaboration with the best of intentions and the highest of hopes.

Yet even when hearts are in the right place and joined together, the intractability of homelessness and challenges of chronic mental illness and a traumatic past can derail the purest motivations.

That doesn’t mean we should give up trying.

Thorpe says he doesn’t regret what he was moved to do, though “I regret that i chose to do it with her.”

“But will it prevent me from doing something in the future?” he is quick to add. “No.”

And Coty, who stands to suffer consequences from the maligning of her reputation as a social worker, also remains undaunted. She notes that though her efforts did not succeed in finding Rose a permanent home, they did keep her off the streets for nearly a year. She wanted to express her gratitude to all the donors who made that possible and to “assure everyone that all the funds were spent on her behalf.”

“As we all know chronic homelessness is a complicated problem with very limited resources,” Coty said. “I would do it all again in order to procure resources for someone with limited financial means and I would encourage all of us to continue to use our acts of kindness to alleviate the many social ills that surround us.

“We cannot stop striving for a more loving world with more empathy for those less fortunate.”