Jessica Spencer
Audio By Carbonatix
The advocate spoke gently to the slumped over woman propped up against her on the curb.
“Anna, they are going to put you in the ice bag,” Sophia Elicia said. “You have to wake up. Hey, baby, they are going to put you in the ice bag, OK?”
It was just after 10:30 in the morning on Aug. 1, and Phoenix was in the middle of a heat wave. Temperatures were already well over 100 degrees, on the way to 116. Anna, who was homeless and lived in the encampment near downtown Phoenix known as the Zone, was suffering from possible heat stroke and, possibly, an overdose. Elicia held her up while firefighters placed bags of ice on her body to cool her down so they could take her to the hospital.
Nearby stood a woman dressed in all black with “EMT” in large white letters emblazoned on the back of her shirt. She and three security guards had responded to the scene from the nearby Key Campus, a homeless solutions hub in the heart of the Zone. Slung over her shoulder was a red backpack with a white cross on the front, a medical kit that the EMT had just finished packing up.
“Do you see what happened here?” Elicia said to her, suddenly irate. “You didn’t call 911 regardless of your training. If these ice bags hadn’t been on her, her temperature would have been even more elevated —”
“You done?” one of the security guards said, trying to cut her off.
“No, I’m not fucking done!” Elicia yelled. “They are about to put her in an ice bag!”
“You better watch how you talk,” the security guard interjected.
“You are going to be hearing from me!” she yelled. “She should have called 911 earlier before playing fucking doctor on the street!”
A summer of stress for Phoenix’s homeless
Anna did make it to the hospital and received care. But the confrontation over her emergency did not end well. The guards, who work for Lionheart Security, pushed Elicia and her partner, Jessica Spencer, onto nearby umbrellas that were providing shade to a homeless man, breaking them.
The dispute, captured on video by the advocates, epitomizes the chaos of trying to serve homeless people on Phoenix’s streets. As service providers and advocates work to help people through the potentially fatal heat — in a summer when the city has decided to curtail how and where people can offer help to the homeless — conflict is inevitably rising, with lives on the line. Maricopa County this year counted nearly 10,000 homeless people living in the county.
Spencer and Elicia are advocates who provide aid to people living on the streets in the Zone. Elicia also runs the Instagram account @unshelteredphx, and regularly films interactions between homeless people and police. She asked to be identified only by her first and middle names out of fear of retaliation.
The couple said that the Aug. 1 incident captured the callous approach to homeless people who remain on the streets by the city and some employees of the contractors working with the homeless service providers in the area. The EMT and security guards should have called 911 immediately, Elicia and Spencer said. Or at the very least asked Anna if she wanted them to. Instead, the EMT tried to cool Anna down herself without a working thermometer while she sat on a blanket that a heat gun used by the advocates registered at 140 degrees. Meanwhile security guards hovered, trying to intimidate them, Spencer and Elicia said, and brushed off the suggestion of calling 911.
“If she denies it, then ultimately we just wasted 911 calls,” one of the security guards can be heard saying to the pair in the video. Later, a security guard said it wasn’t the EMTs job to call.
In the end, Spencer called 911. By the time the firefighters arrived, she and Elicia, who’d stumbled across the security guards and EMT helping Anna while out providing aid, had been on the scene for about 15 minutes.
“I still regret, like, feeling like they had any type of authority because there were so many hesitations that I did,” Elicia said. “If they’re behaving like this while we were around them, then how are they behaving with every other call? I swear she was practicing her vitals. That’s fucked up.”
A mishmash of service providers and police
Anna’s emergency occurred on a curved stretch of road at 11th Avenue and Jackson Street. Known as the “Andre House Curve,” it’s sandwiched between the Key Campus and the Andre House of Hospitality. Andre House is an independent nonprofit service provider. Keys to Change runs the Key Campus, a service hub for homeless people that the city partially funds.
Office of Homeless Solutions spokesperson Kristin Couturier directed Phoenix New Times to reach out to Keys to Change about the incident because while the city contracts with Keys to Change, she wrote in an email, it does not hold the contract with the security company, Lionheart Security Services.
Keys to Change CEO Amy Schwabenlender said that the organization contracts with Lionheart but only for services on the campus. The same applied for the EMT who is contracted through a different vendor. She was unable to identify the people involved or the company that employed the EMT.
“The incident referenced did occur off of the Keys to Change property,” she wrote in an email. “It is up to any organization to respond to emergencies where they feel compelled and in alignment with their values of helping people in need.”
Lionheart security guards work to keep a scene clear during an emergency so first responders can access it, Ethan Caen, the general manager of Lionheart Security, wrote in an email.
“After verbal requests to step back were disregarded, officers physically relocated the individuals outside the immediate danger zone to restore access for emergency crews and to ensure public safety,” he wrote.
The company reviewed the incident internally and found that the guards acted within protocol.
Disbanded in 2023 because of a court order, the Zone exists today in a smaller form, with fewer people and tents. In July, to remain in compliance with that order, the city cleared people from the Andre House Curve and set up barricades closing down the stretched of road through the weekend. The city said the police sweep — larger than other sweeps, and conducted without the usual warnings — was a planned operation between the Office of Homeless Solutions, the Phoenix Police Department and some of the city’s nonprofit partners. Seven people were arrested for felonies, according to the city, and 18 were “contacted” for trespassing and camping and were either arrested for existing warrants or issued citations.
Cisco, the man whose umbrellas were broken, told New Times that he was in the area when the sweep happened on Thursday morning but he’d moved his stuff in time to avoid getting caught up in the barricades. He and others set up again in new spots just outside of the closed stretch of street. Officers have come by since, he said, but not in force and only to tell them to move. The hellish heat is a larger concern.
“We were camping over there,” he said, pointing across the street to a spot just outside of the barricades where he’d set up after the sweep. “It seems like we get more sun on this side.”
Couturier said the city’s focus after police were finished was connecting people to services, including heat relief. The office “contacted 33 people and 15 people accepted placement,” she wrote in an email.
“It’s possible there is overlap with the people who were cited and the people we placed, but that’s not something we specifically tracked,” she wrote.
Jessica Spencer
‘Clearly that was assault’
People living on the streets are at risk for heat related illnesses and possible overdoses during heat waves, advocates said. Police enforcement pushes people to move more frequently and limits their access to shade. In triple-digit summer heat, situations like Anna’s are bound to increase.
Elicia was right to call 911 that day, said Elizabeth Venable, the lead organizer and cofounder of the Fund for Empowerment. She was also out on the streets that weekend providing heat relief. She doesn’t understand why the security guards and EMTs didn’t call 911, but she wasn’t surprised. Homeless service providers often employ low-paid contractors who don’t have proper training, she said.
“They’re some of the weakest links, and some of the most disrespectful,” she said.
If the contractors were on the clock, she said, Keys to Change and the city should take responsibility for their shoving Elicia and Spencer.
“Clearly that was assault,” said Venable. “They have no authority as security guards to shove people like that.”
Elicia and Spencer left the area once they knew Anna was safe with the firefighters. Elicia wished they’d taken out the heat gun sooner. She remembered the feeling of sitting on the 140-degree blanket with Anna, holding her up and trying to keep her conscious.
“It was burning. It was burning so bad,” she said. “It was just such a fuck-up for us to not start immediately with the temperature on the ground if heat exhaustion is absolutely playing a part. She cannot cool down, even if there’s ice bags on top of her.”
