Miss-Delectable
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http://www.telegram.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060630/COLUMN44/606300338/1008/NEWS02
It didn’t seem like anything could rise above the oppressive heat and humidity that fell on Great Brook Valley Wednesday.
The public housing units, arrayed in their lock-step design and dressed in the same dour brick façade, had their stairwell entrance doors wide open, giving the impression that the buildings themselves were gasping for air.
Sitting on the stoop outside one of these stairwell doors, three young women, their faces harboring a weightiness one is not accustomed to seeing in their age group, shifted positions warily to let a visitor by.
Then along came 6-year-old Solimar, skipping with the lightness of a butterfly, too young perhaps, I thought, to succumb to the harshness of her life.
She gave the visitor a wide, welcoming smile, and wanting to be helpful, bounded up three flights of stairs to knock loudly at an apartment door with a sign reading “No Smoking — Oxygen in Use.”
The apartment is where Solimar lives with her mother, Catalina Olivencia, and her 3-year-old sibling, Ricardo. Ricardo exists in a near vegetative state. The child is blind, and cannot hear or speak. He uses a wheelchair, is always strapped with an oxygen tank, and is fed through a stomach tube.
It is a tough life, and it appears it will soon get tougher, because Ms. Olivencia, according to the Worcester Housing Authority, has broken one of its cardinal rules and therefore must be evicted.
“I am the last of the Olivencias, and they want to get rid of me,” said Ms. Olivencia, who moved into Great Brook Valley two years ago.
“I remember the first day I moved in and I went to get my key, they told me that instead of Great Brook Valley, it should have been called the ‘Great Olivencia.’ ”
The Olivencias in Great Brook Valley apparently have a reputation as troublemakers, drug users and dealers, and the Great Raymond Mariano, executive director of the WHA, and who personally led a raid on Ms. Olivencia’s apartment seeking illegal tenants, believes she is a chip off the family block.
They found no illegal tenants, but Mr. Mariano thinks they got her nonetheless.
In March, Ms. Olivencia got into a fight with a pregnant visitor to the Valley and was charged with assault and battery. The altercation broke a probation agreement she had signed with the WHA.
That agreement came out of a WHA raid on her apartment on Feb. 11, 2005. According to court records, the police executed a search warrant for heroin at her apartment, and found a blue zip-lock bag with marijuana.
According to Ms. Olivencia, there was no search warrant. The police and WHA officials came to her door, told her they were looking for heroin and asked to come in.
She let them in and they found nothing. Earlier that day, however, she said, she had been cleaning up the stairway landing outside her door, and found an empty zip-lock bag, which she placed in a trash bag.
“They found the bag in the trash, and because of that they wanted to evict me,” she said. “There are people smoking in the stairwell all the time and they are always leaving weed bags on the stairs.”
She noted that she was not prosecuted for the alleged marijuana possession, but instead had agreed with WHA officials to go on probation in lieu of going in front of a judge.
“I was afraid of being evicted, so I signed the probation agreement,” she said.
“If I was a drug dealer, I would have been evicted a long time ago. I would have had my kids taken away from me,” she said.
Ms. Olivencia said she is being evicted because she tried to force the hand of WHA officials. For two years, she had been asking for a transfer to a first-floor apartment to make it easier for her to respond to the frequent emergency medical needs of her son.
Despite letters from her pediatrician and other health officials, the WHA has not responded to her request. In fact, she has had to refile for the transfer because the WHA said it had lost the original paperwork.
“So I got mad, and wrote them a letter saying I would take legal action if they did not respond to my transfer request,” she said. “It was right after that they started trying to evict me.”
Mr. Mariano said if a reporter had not brought up the transfer request, he would not have known about it. Staff take care of such issues, he said.
“She is on the list of the tenants giving us the most problems,” Mr. Mariano said.
“She is being evicted not because of something I did, but because of something she did,” he said.
Ms. Olivencia says she understands the need to clean up Great Brook Valley, but she insists that in her case, “they are kicking out the wrong people.”
“I know this is a tough place,” she said. “There have been shootouts around here. I am hearing my daughter now saying she is going to kill people. She was never like that. It is the environment.”
It didn’t seem like anything could rise above the oppressive heat and humidity that fell on Great Brook Valley Wednesday.
The public housing units, arrayed in their lock-step design and dressed in the same dour brick façade, had their stairwell entrance doors wide open, giving the impression that the buildings themselves were gasping for air.
Sitting on the stoop outside one of these stairwell doors, three young women, their faces harboring a weightiness one is not accustomed to seeing in their age group, shifted positions warily to let a visitor by.
Then along came 6-year-old Solimar, skipping with the lightness of a butterfly, too young perhaps, I thought, to succumb to the harshness of her life.
She gave the visitor a wide, welcoming smile, and wanting to be helpful, bounded up three flights of stairs to knock loudly at an apartment door with a sign reading “No Smoking — Oxygen in Use.”
The apartment is where Solimar lives with her mother, Catalina Olivencia, and her 3-year-old sibling, Ricardo. Ricardo exists in a near vegetative state. The child is blind, and cannot hear or speak. He uses a wheelchair, is always strapped with an oxygen tank, and is fed through a stomach tube.
It is a tough life, and it appears it will soon get tougher, because Ms. Olivencia, according to the Worcester Housing Authority, has broken one of its cardinal rules and therefore must be evicted.
“I am the last of the Olivencias, and they want to get rid of me,” said Ms. Olivencia, who moved into Great Brook Valley two years ago.
“I remember the first day I moved in and I went to get my key, they told me that instead of Great Brook Valley, it should have been called the ‘Great Olivencia.’ ”
The Olivencias in Great Brook Valley apparently have a reputation as troublemakers, drug users and dealers, and the Great Raymond Mariano, executive director of the WHA, and who personally led a raid on Ms. Olivencia’s apartment seeking illegal tenants, believes she is a chip off the family block.
They found no illegal tenants, but Mr. Mariano thinks they got her nonetheless.
In March, Ms. Olivencia got into a fight with a pregnant visitor to the Valley and was charged with assault and battery. The altercation broke a probation agreement she had signed with the WHA.
That agreement came out of a WHA raid on her apartment on Feb. 11, 2005. According to court records, the police executed a search warrant for heroin at her apartment, and found a blue zip-lock bag with marijuana.
According to Ms. Olivencia, there was no search warrant. The police and WHA officials came to her door, told her they were looking for heroin and asked to come in.
She let them in and they found nothing. Earlier that day, however, she said, she had been cleaning up the stairway landing outside her door, and found an empty zip-lock bag, which she placed in a trash bag.
“They found the bag in the trash, and because of that they wanted to evict me,” she said. “There are people smoking in the stairwell all the time and they are always leaving weed bags on the stairs.”
She noted that she was not prosecuted for the alleged marijuana possession, but instead had agreed with WHA officials to go on probation in lieu of going in front of a judge.
“I was afraid of being evicted, so I signed the probation agreement,” she said.
“If I was a drug dealer, I would have been evicted a long time ago. I would have had my kids taken away from me,” she said.
Ms. Olivencia said she is being evicted because she tried to force the hand of WHA officials. For two years, she had been asking for a transfer to a first-floor apartment to make it easier for her to respond to the frequent emergency medical needs of her son.
Despite letters from her pediatrician and other health officials, the WHA has not responded to her request. In fact, she has had to refile for the transfer because the WHA said it had lost the original paperwork.
“So I got mad, and wrote them a letter saying I would take legal action if they did not respond to my transfer request,” she said. “It was right after that they started trying to evict me.”
Mr. Mariano said if a reporter had not brought up the transfer request, he would not have known about it. Staff take care of such issues, he said.
“She is on the list of the tenants giving us the most problems,” Mr. Mariano said.
“She is being evicted not because of something I did, but because of something she did,” he said.
Ms. Olivencia says she understands the need to clean up Great Brook Valley, but she insists that in her case, “they are kicking out the wrong people.”
“I know this is a tough place,” she said. “There have been shootouts around here. I am hearing my daughter now saying she is going to kill people. She was never like that. It is the environment.”