Daniel Rubin: Logan Square Samaritan trying to save herself, too
It didn't take long to track down the homeless woman who helped rescue the former city housing commissioner. Tommy Massaro asked that I pass along his thanks. The woman had rushed to his aid last Sunday when he collapsed on the way to Hahnemann University Hospital. She held his head, and shielded him from the sun, as others drove by without stopping.
It didn't take long to track down the homeless woman who helped rescue the former city housing commissioner.
Tommy Massaro asked that I pass along his thanks. The woman had rushed to his aid last Sunday when he collapsed on the way to Hahnemann University Hospital. She held his head, and shielded him from the sun, as others drove by without stopping.
Sister Mary Scullion of Project HOME put one of her best sleuths on the case - Sam Santiago, an outreach worker and retired Philadelphia cop.
On Wednesday, Santiago visited homeless people who spend their time by the Cathedral Basilica of SS. Peter and Paul, where this had happened, and made inquiries.
The first person said Tina had helped the man - Tina who lives around the corner.
Which was what brought me to 18th and Vine, to a shady spot where a stout woman sat on a chunk of granite, flashing a gap-toothed smile.
She insisted I take her pillow. "It's a cushion for you," she said.
Tina wore a freshly laundered plaid Polo jersey, blue sweatpants, and New Balance sneakers. "People give us these things," she said.
A crack addict with heart
Her real name is Elizabeth Leath. She is 43. She has been on the street since May, when she got out of SCI Muncy. She was in prison for selling crack. She has been on the pipe since she was 21.
Here's what happened last Sunday: She was sitting in this spot after the food vans arrived, finishing her baked chicken and rice, feeding the fat to sparrows, when she saw Massaro walk by on his way to the hospital. She watched him fall in the middle of the street.
Plate in hand, she ran to him.
She helped turn him on his side, thinking he was having an epileptic seizure, and made sure he could breathe.
Seven or eight cars passed as she and others who had stopped waited for paramedics, who took Massaro to the hospital. He has a heart condition, kidney problems, tumors.
Massaro, 56, a product of the Paterson, N.J., projects and Harvard, came here 30 years ago from Newark, N.J., where he was housing director. Since his year in the Green administration, he has been a private builder of affordable housing. His health has suffered since 2003 when he was renovating a Rome church and collapsed on a street.
Eyes of the neighborhood
Massaro was lucky he fell where he did last week, because Tina sees everything, said her friend Thomasina Harrell, who joined our conversation. The women met in prison.
"She's a character," said Harrell, who is 38. "She's fun to be with. Smart, too. She loves to read."
I looked down and saw Tina's open book by her feet, The Loveliest Dead, by Ray Garton. "I like horror," she says. "Blood and killers."
"She's sadistic," Harrell ribbed her friend.
Behind Tina stood a newish piece of rolling luggage. She said her clothes, ropes and tarps were in there. Until that morning, the tarps had hung from the trees. Police told her to pull her tent down - second time that had happened.
"I had a nice camp," she said.
She said she was outside because "when I'm in the 'hood, that's when I get high." She's down to smoking crack once a week, she said. "I'm rehabilitating myself out here."
We spoke for about an hour. The personal details she offered were sketchy. Her parents are gone. A brother still lives in Mount Airy. She grew up in Germantown, went to ninth grade before dropping out, once played pretty good softball.
When she was arrested in 2003 for selling a $10 rock of crack to a police informant inside a North Philadelphia rowhouse, she said, that was her only source of income.
As I was leaving, Santiago helped her fill out forms so he could check her into One Day at a Time, a drug and alcohol recovery program at 17th and Montgomery.
On Friday, Santiago told me what had happened next.
"I had her all set up to go in, and she just turned around and said, 'I'm not ready to go anywhere.' I'm going to keep coming by."
Massaro hopes to get out of Hahnemann the beginning of this week. He will look for her next time he delivers a tin of lasagna to the homeless men and women who gather outside the church.
He'll invite her over to his apartment. He said, "I'm going to make her the best meal she's ever had."