The curtain falls B illy Baggett knew that smoking cannabis would likely get him kicked out of the Hotel Alder, but he said he could breathe easier when he was high. The second time he failed a urine test, in September 2019, he was told he had to leave.
Once a person loses their reentry housing in Multnomah County, the next step is typically to place them on a wait list for a homeless shelter, said Dave Riley, Baggett’s reentry counselor. There are other housing wait lists to be put on as well, but it’s rare to find something right away. Given Baggett’s condition, it’s unlikely he would have survived homelessness very long.
But his HIV diagnosis saved him from that fate. A nonprofit that worked with him since his release, Cascade AIDS Project, moved him into the Bridgeway Inn & Suites near the Portland International Airport. His room was paid for with a federal grant from the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program while the nonprofit’s staff searched for a more permanent place for him to live.
After spending most of his life in prison, Billy Baggett was released into a world he no longer understood, contending with a lifetime of trauma and coming to terms with his imminent death. In a landscape where only the sickest of the sick get supportive housing, new resources become available when you contract HIV. But even then, it can be highly competitive. Baggett’s caseworker with the county’s health department, Kristin Meyer, was hoping to see him get a room at Our House, an assisted living facility for people with HIV. Even though he was suffering from multiple chronic illnesses and essentially dying, there was someone worse off who got the first open bed that became available.
Before his death, Baggett asked Cascade AIDS Project employees to speak about his case for this story. Supervisors at the nonprofit asked that we not publish staff names given the continuing stigma associated with HIV.
Cascade AIDS Project works with many HIV-positive people coming out of incarceration but is unable to connect with roughly half of those who request its services prior to their release. This is due to a poor working relationship with the Oregon Department of Corrections, said one Cascade AIDS Project case manager.
The nonprofit was able to move Baggett into Bud Clark Commons before his hotel voucher ran out, which another case manager at the nonprofit said “is pretty unheard of” due to the complex’s long wait list and high vulnerability requirements.
But county employees working with Baggett thought he would be more successful somewhere else.
Bud Clark Commons is located in Old Town. A seven-story building with 130 studio apartments, it opened in 2011 to house the city’s most vulnerable people experiencing homelessness. In line with the Housing First model, residents are permitted to drink and use drugs behind their closed doors. The building has at times put a strain on police , with high rates of disturbances involving drugs and weapons.
“There’s a lot of sketchy behavior that goes on over there,” Riley said. “And I want to make sure that he’s OK, given that he’s a pretty vulnerable guy with a lot of medical issues. And, even though it sounds like marijuana is just his main drug of choice, I don’t want to see him get into some other things there.”
Baggett wanted to live downtown, near his doctor’s office at the Multnomah County Health Department headquarters and close to the county parole office — places he rode his motorized wheelchair to on a regular basis. He also liked the abundance of foot traffic — plenty of people who might be open to an impromptu conversation with a stranger, or who might smile at his disappearing cigarette trick.
While Bud Clark Commons is in the heart of the city, Baggett disliked living there. He said he didn’t like the people he’d run into in the elevator, and he was surrounded with drug use that he often found triggering. And he was lonely. He complained he’d often sit in his room alone all day with nothing to do and no visitors. He worried he would die in the apartment and no one would know for weeks.
He never relapsed, but near his death, it was getting increasingly difficult to stay away from heroin. He also struggled to quit smoking every time he left the hospital, where doctors fought to keep his lungs functioning. He could buy a single cigarette off just about anyone, and the smell always lingered in the air outside the building.
While his modern studio had a nice view and was in good condition, it was small and constructed for an able-bodied person, not someone in a wheelchair. He didn’t have any in-home medical support until early November, after he’d been living there a couple of months. That’s when the county began sending a nurse, Trevis Hutsell, to visit him in his studio apartment several times a week to help him with tasks like organizing his medication and managing his oxygen tanks.
“He had at least one fall in his apartment that he let me know about because he couldn’t get in and out of the bathtub that was made for a fully-abled person,” Hutsell said. “It was very hard to make adaptations to. Even though he had an occupational therapist who came in and helped him set up systems, it wasn’t enough.”
Baggett was hospitalized regularly, beginning shortly after his release from prison — sometimes riding by ambulance to Legacy Good Samaritan hospital multiple times in a single day.
Once, he took an ambulance to the hospital but walked out when staff told him to discard his marijuana. Instead, he took it home, then called 911 and rode another ambulance back to the hospital.
Other times nurses would simply warn him to put his cannabis vaporizer pen away. “You can’t smoke that in here, Billy,” a nurse told him once when he pulled it out mischievously during an interview.
B aggett’s last Christmas was rough. He spent it at Good Samaritan arguing with nurses who he said lost his clothes and medicine. “I threatened to crawl outta here on my hands and knees, butt naked,” he said. “But they talked me into staying another day.”
He was also upset because when he was rushed out of his apartment to an ambulance, EMTs left his apartment door unlocked. It was seven hours before the staff at Bud Clark Commons secured it, and he feared his possessions had been stolen.
When I saw him at the hospital just before the start of 2020, his hair had been chopped short in an uneven and patchy fashion. He said nursing staff gave him the sloppy haircut because when he arrived at the hospital, his long hair was a tangled mess.
“I hadn’t showered for weeks,” he said. He was incapable of washing himself and had no one to help him with that task. He said he was embarrassed about the way he smelled.
But Baggett was averse to the idea of assisted living, afraid it would eat up his Social Security checks and that he wouldn’t be able to do as he pleased. After a lifetime behind bars, freedom was of the utmost importance.
“A lot of people on his medical team really believed that Billy needed to live in a facility to thrive,” said Hutsell. “But it was really clear that he didn’t want to be living by other people’s rules. He wanted that opportunity to make choices for himself.”
Baggett wanted rich experiences in the time he had left, many that proved too difficult — or impossible. He wanted to visit the Pacific Ocean. He wanted to find love again — man or woman, he said; it didn’t matter which. He wanted to fly to Georgia and see his sister and her kids. None of his relatives made the trip to Portland to see him after he was released from prison. He called his sister regularly. Sometimes, she’d answer.
“He’s got this take on life where he just wants to live it to the fullest,” his county case manager, Meyers, said before he passed. “He likes to laugh and tell jokes, and his magic tricks. He’s really friendly; he will pretty much just stop and talk to anybody — in the hallway or along the way. I think he just wants to be connected to people.”
Baggett managed to check a few things off his bucket list before he died. He watched a live drag show. A couple months after his release, he bought himself a large pair of red satin panties and a wig. He found intimacy with another person, albeit it a short-lived affair with a hard drug user who would ask him for money. And, he had enough money to feel some actual autonomy in the last months of his life. He got a back-payment from Social Security, of more than $11,000 that was owed to him from years ago when he was out on parole in Portland the first time. He bought new furniture for his studio apartment in Bud Clark Commons. A formerly incarcerated peer mentor with Cascade AIDS Project, who CAP asked we not identify, went with Baggett to Michael’s Fine Furniture on Northeast 181st Avenue.
“He was like a king in his kingdom,” the peer mentor said. “He was like, ‘I’ll take it, I’ll take it, I’ll take it!’ And it was just cool to watch because I know he’s probably never been able to do that.” Baggett spent $6,000 that day.
His furnishings were a point of pride. So were his fully stocked refrigerator and cupboards, which he often showed off.
But through it all, Baggett suffered relentlessly from air hunger — a feeling of suffocating despite inhaling lungs full of air — common with late stage COPD.
As death neared, he contended with many demons. He feared for the eternal damnation of his soul. He mourned a life lost to confinement. And he feared his final months of freedom would be taken from him.
“The biggest struggle for him was the daily emotional fear of going back to jail,” his nurse, Hutsell, said. “Many times we sat, while he cried — afraid of acting out or of getting upset with somebody and doing something that he would regret and ending up back in jail — he lived in fear of his P.O. officer. … For Billy, she held so much power over him that he lived in fear of making a mistake.”
He reflected on the experiences he’d had over the years, telling anyone who would listen his story — he spoke about the traumas he had endured. He was often sad that his life was ending without ever really having been lived.
“There was so much about being out in society that he just loved,” Hutsell said. “He was just excited to see people walking down the street, to ride the streetcar, take the bus someplace. … He really did also struggle to create intimacy and friendships. He was really looking for people who would be a real friend to him, and when people would use him or were not upfront about what they were doing, it really upset him.
“He actually let at least one guy stay with him in the apartment for a week or so, just because he was like, ‘You don’t have a place to go, let me help you out, you don’t have any food, let me feed you.’”
On Feb. 28, Baggett died alone on the third floor of the Good Samaritan hospital. He’d been admitted four times that month.
What wasn’t understood at the time is that had he lived any longer, he would have been imprisoned again, only this time by a pandemic. Alternately, if he hadn’t been granted early release, he would have been vulnerable to catching COVID-19 in prison. As of Dec. 4, 1,407 Oregon state prisoners had tested positive.
Hutsell was the last person outside of hospital staff to see Baggett alive. He visited him on Feb. 26, and the two spoke about whether he should go into hospice, as his medical providers at the hospital were suggesting.
Baggett didn’t want to do that, and he told Hutsell he didn’t see the point. He told me the same thing over the phone the same day. He wasn’t ready to go, he said.
Hutsell told him people often go into hospice so they can be at home, surrounded with friends and family as they die. “But I have no friends or family,” Hutsell recalled Baggett saying. “My friends are the people working at CAP, my friends are the people at the clinic, my friends are the managers at Bud Clark, my friends are Emily over at Street Roots, these are my friends.” Hutsell told Baggett he cared about him and that he knew others did as well.
“I had to reflect to him that (what he said) was beautiful, and also really hard,” said Hutsell. “Because I know that we are all professionals that are, in one way or another, paid to be there with him.”
As Baggett lay in his deathbed, Jennifer Creswell, the chaplain at Good Samaritan, said she “assured him of God’s forgiveness” as he shared his fears of going to hell for the crimes he’d committed.
She said before he died that day, she sang songs with him — mostly about freedom.
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