I had a test today. I only had a few hours of sleep last night; I was really worried about what had happened at the shelter. I have another test on Wednesday.
It's the same supervisor who did nothing in 2014, when a guest who had probably just gotten out of jail for 2009 armed bank robbery harassed and stalked me around the shelter. I didn't know she was a felon until she had harassed and stalked me for so many weeks that I went to the police station to tell the police, in case she tried to hit me. While I was walking to the police station, I Googled "(her) Boston arrest." That was when I found out that she was a felon. It didn't surprise me; as soon as I met her, she targeted me for bullying and was more vicious and aggressive than any female guest of any shelter had ever been. After I talked to the police, I tried to tell the supervisor, privately, that I'd found out the guest who'd been stalking me and harassing me had a violent felony conviction. The supervisor screamed at me and threw me out of her office. A few months later, the supervisor gave that guest, about whom I had futilely asked for help to stop the harassment and stalking for months, the locker above my locker, ensuring that I couldn't avoid interacting with her. That was why I fled the Pine Street Inn for mental hospitals in the late fall and early winter of 2014; I didn't spend another night at the Pine Street Inn until I left the Quincy Mental Health Center in 2015. The guest had left by then.
Unfortunately, 2015 was the year that there was a new, male employee at the Pine Street Inn who immediately began to stalk and harass me around the shelter. There was one day when I couldn't leave the shelter because it was during the lottery; he and another male employee stalked and harassed me until they had forced me into this alcove:
That's the gate that is raised when guests are served breakfast and dinner; "served" is not really accurate. It's like a school cafeteria line, without options other than to take what they give you or not.
That day, those two male employees followed me everywhere in the shelter and harassed me. I would send an email from my phone, asking for help from someone else who worked at the shelter, hoping that she'd read it. Then I'd move to another part of the shelter, and they would stalk and harass me there. By the time that the employee checked her email, I had written her several messages, and I was in that alcove; there was nowhere else, and they were stalking and harassing me there, also.
That female employee told them to leave me alone; one of the men was a temporary employee who only worked there a few more times. The other one stalked and harassed me for 8 months, while a few employees tried to help me and were intimidated by the supervisors and staff who were either in denial about what was happening, harassing me themselves, or enjoying watching it happen.
He was so encouraged by the inability of people who wanted to help and the punitive attitude toward me of those who didn't want to help that he harassed other female guests of the shelter. I would try to be at the shelter at a certain time so that I could have a chair in the middle of the chairs for guests in the lobby; the chairs are taken quickly when the shelter opens in the afternoon. I wanted to be where he couldn't walk near me or sit near me. I finally realized that all I could do was to verbally confront him when he stalked me, so that he would know that I wouldn't submit if he physically attacked me. I was screamed at for verbally confronting him; however, other women whom he had stalked and harassed began to approach me to ask me what he was doing to me; when I told them, they said he'd done the same things to them and that they thought they were his only targets.
They filed reports, and he was finally fired. He was fired the day after the last time that I verbally confronted him, to which he had responded by threatening to call security and have me thrown out of the building. He wasn't fired by the supervisor who enabled his behavior; I think she would have enabled him for years.
I had already written about all of the above before I moved to the apartment that I had from March 2016 to May 2017; I wrote about all of those things during the years that they happened. When I say that homelessness is life-threatening and that the conglomerate is bullying me to death, I'm not being dramatic; it's the truth. The conglomerate DOESN'T CARE.
I was shocked last night, when that same supervisor screamed at me for telling her that a male security guard was harassing me. One of the things she said was "You're not going to put us through this again," as if I were the perpetrator when I was being abused in 2014 and 2015.
Copyright L. Kochman, June 19, 2017 @ 4:15 p.m.
