loading...
Canwest News Service
Coralee Bergman's mother used to dress her in frilly pink frocks with matching bonnets, taking pictures of the young girl who resembled a blue-eyed, blond-haired china doll in knee-highs and black patent-leather shoes.
"I remember she used to put me in dresses and do my hair. She was a very showy mom," Coralee, now 28, recalls.
The mother she is referring to is Dawn Amanda Bergman, a homeless woman who died a brutal death one year ago when a candle ignited her shopping cart in Vancouver's West End. She is better known to the public by her street moniker, Tracy, which is her brother's first name.
Dawn was a young mother, and by most accounts a good one, until she and her husband started using drugs in the 1980s. Their four children were taken by social services. Dawn struggled to stay clean but lapsed. She would go on to have six more children, all of them eventually seized. Dawn would spend some time in jail for a violent crime, and afterward her home would be a shopping cart near Davie and Hornby.
To most people, she was just one of the hundreds of nameless, faceless people shivering in the cold on Vancouver streets until her death on Dec. 19, 2008 horrified the city.
This week, as Vancouver city hall unveiled its 2010 Winter Response Plan, Mayor Gregor Robertson said it was influenced by the recommendations in the coroner's report into Dawn's death. "We are responding to the coroner's report on the death of a homeless woman named Tracy in the West End that called for more shelters that accept carts and pets, that are in neighbourhoods where there are homeless populations with needs," the mayor said.
Both the city and the province have been tackling Vancouver's massive homelessness problem, but still hundreds will be sleeping outside this winter. Much was accomplished in 2009, and there are plans to continue that work in 2010, but more needs to be done to reach the mayor's goal of eliminating homelessness by 2015.
While Coralee Bergman bluntly acknowledges her mother was not always a sympathetic character, she remains grief-stricken by her death. The Surrey woman finds some comfort in knowing her mother's story has impacted many people.
"But it really sucks that someone has to die to make change," said Coralee who, along with her uncle Tracy Tucker, agreed to speak publicly for the first time about Dawn's life.
Born Dawn Tucker in 1962, she was five years old when her parents, devastated by the death of her infant sister in a car crash, adopted a baby boy they named Tracy. Their father was a truck driver and mechanic, and the family moved around a lot, living in communities in British Columbia and the Yukon Territory.
"She was outgoing," Tracy Tucker recalled. "She loved to paint. She was very artistic.
"She was kind of a geeky kid up to Grade 7 or 8." Then she grew into a striking teenager who rebelled against her parents' rules and ran away from home in the 1970s.
First child at 18
Dawn had her first baby, Christopher, when she was 18 years old in Whitehorse, where her family then lived. Soon after she married Merril Bergman, a bricklayer, and they relocated with one-year-old Christopher to Delta, where Coralee was born in 1981.
Tracy moved in with the young family when he was 14, after refusing to move to a Christian commune with his parents. However, the relatively happy home in Delta started to deteriorate before Dawn's next two babies, Carrea and Cayley, were born.
"The first few Christmases were awesome. I remember having so many toys and presents. Then one year it all changed," Coralee recalled. "And it just got worse through the years."
Her mother began working as an exotic dancer. Both parents started using drugs. There was abuse in the home.
When the four children were seized by social services they ranged in age from an infant to 10 years. They were taken in by Anna and Bert Draayers, Surrey foster parents who were well known in the 1990s for looking after dozens of children, some of them with challenges such as fetal alcohol syndrome.
Their mother visited during the first year, but the four children would live with the Draayers for the next eight years.
Dawn would get clean and relapse in the 1990s, and during that decade she would have six more children. There are family photos of Dawn with some of these babies, but they were all seized by social services.
Tucker believes that was a grief his sister could never overcome, and part of the reason her addiction was so powerful. "She couldn't get over that fact, losing all the kids. That kept her in her addiction longer and longer," he said.
In 1999, Dawn participated in a brutal Abbotsford home invasion which left an 84-year-old woman with serious injuries. Addicted to heroin at the time, she testified she was made a scapegoat by the others involved with the crime, but the judge rejected her testimony.
While in prison, Dawn's artistic flair emerged, as she sewed clothing and sold it to staff and other prisoners.
Tucker phoned his sister in jail, and Coralee visited her in 2001. Dawn had been friendly, she recalled, asking for canteen money and giving her daughter a beaded belt with spiders on it.
"She looked good. She was very much like a small child, though. I could tell she was stuck in the age she started using. She talked like a little girl," Coralee recalled.
Her mother phoned again from jail in 2004. "She said, 'Hi. I miss you. I love you. I apologize for not being there.' She said, 'I wish I could see you.'" It was the last time Coralee heard her mother's voice.
A home of blankets
After being released from prison in 2005, Tucker said, his sister began living in an Abbotsford park, where he heard she often lectured younger people to get off drugs. She eventually drifted to Vancouver.
Tucker last saw his sister in the fall of 2008, after bumping into her on Granville Street. He had seen little of her over the previous 20 years, as he had spent much of that time in and out of jail.
Dawn had been in good spirits, he recalled. He was using drugs then, too, and living in the Brandeez hotel. Dawn asked if she could stay with him, but there was a $10 guest fee and neither had the cash.
Dawn showed her brother her carefully constructed home, made of blankets and tarps draped over a large cart.
"She was proud of the shelter. She had little lights in it," he recalled. "She took pride in how she was living out there, even though she didn't want to be living out there."
The coroner's report, which noted Dawn had an "extensive history" of substance abuse and mental health issues, said she refused to go to a shelter on the freezing cold evening of Dec. 19, 2008 because none would allow her to bring her trolley full of possessions.
Coroner Kate Corcoran concluded candles Dawn was using to keep warm likely caused her blankets to smoulder while she slept, emitting carbon dioxide which impaired her ability to wake up and escape the fire.
Corcoran made two recommendations: that the city establish shelters in the winter in which homeless people can bring their carts, and that the locations of those facilities be made available to the non-profit agencies managing them "well in advance of opening."
The city followed the first recommendation, as two new HEAT (Homeless Emergency Action Team) shelters have recently been opened, in addition to the three HEAT shelters that began operating at the time of Dawn's death.
However, governments have fallen down on the report's second recommendation, as the province only committed to the $1.2 million funding in mid-December. That meant non-profits had to scramble to get the newest shelters open in Mount Pleasant and under the Granville Street Bridge by Dec. 22 and Jan. 6 respectively — after winter had already set in.
And city hall is still looking for locations for two more 40-bed HEAT shelters, scheduled to be open in the coming weeks in Kitsilano and the West End.
The HEAT shelters allow carts and pets. They also serve two meals a day, which the city believes has contributed to a reduction in aggressive panhandling.
The March 2008 homeless count suggested there were then at least 1,600 people sleeping on Vancouver streets, and most experts agree that is a conservative estimate.
In addition to the 420 beds in the five temporary HEAT facilities, the city runs 750 year-round shelter beds. But that still leaves more than 430 people sleeping outside each night — and even if the two new HEAT shelters open, there would still be more than 350 people left in the cold.
And, when the HEAT shelters close in April, it isn't clear where the 500 people sleeping in those beds will go.
Because the recession has stunted provincial funding for new permanent housing, city hall's short-term plan is to try to replace shelter beds with more interim housing.
An example of that is Dunsmuir House, which is leased from a private owner and was opened in November to offer 160 rooms. It is now mostly full of young people who were staying at two downtown HEAT shelters that were closed last summer following complaints from neighbours.
The city is courting Victoria, churches, the private sector, philanthropists, and advocacy groups for financial help.
"We're hoping that we can get funding from the province and anyone else who will step up to create housing options in the spring. We really need to transition people from shelters to housing," Robertson said.
Mayor remains confident
This crisis has been created, in part, by the federal government backing away from building social housing, and that needs to be reversed, he said. While "the homeless population is bigger than it's ever been," the mayor remains confident he can accomplish his goal to end the crisis by 2015.
Some new permanent social housing did open in 2009, including the Lux (92 units), Kindred Place (87 units), and Woodwards (200 units). The Union Gospel Mission is building 91 new units, and 252 affordable housing units are to open in the Olympic Village.
In April, 102 rooms are to open at the Bosman Hotel, where a federal government study will monitor the benefits of providing housing and support to the mentally ill.
The city has also provided land on which the province was to construct 14 new social housing buildings. Six are under construction– four of them started just last month — but won't all be complete until late 2011. The recession, city hall says, has meant delays of provincial funding for the remaining eight sites.
Housing minister Rich Coleman is on holidays and his staff said no one else in the provincial government could speak about the B.C. Liberals' plans in 2010 to address homelessness.
However, an official said in an e-mail that the province has in recent years bought 24 SROs (Single Room Occupancy) to protect 1,480 pre-existing rooms in Vancouver, and "given the current economic recession, . . . is doing everything within its power to fast-track [new] social housing projects."
In the meantime, people on the streets will struggle to survive this winter.
lculbert@vancouversun.com
