Unhoused Arlington woman’s family hopes her obituary will spur conversations on mental illness

In one of the last pictures taken of Carol Sauer, she’s sitting at the Arlington bus stop where
she often spent her time.

It was one place her brother, Bob, and his wife, Tricia, would come looking for her, especially when it was cold.

“She did not want to be homeless. She just didn’t know why she was homeless,” Bob Sauer said.

After she died, Bob and Tricia penned a death notice in an attempt to present a fuller picture of Carol, but to also document the challenges trying to get help for a loved one with severe mental illness.

“While Carol was still living, I started writing it because I just didn’t want to be, her life and death to be in vain,” Tricia Sauer said.

Carol’s story started with a normal childhood in a loving home. She was a straight-A student, went to college for a few years and landed a job with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Then she worked at a department store.

Bob said her mental illness began to emerge 20 years ago when she was suddenly evicted from her apartment. They brought her to their Loudoun County home and began to arrange for an appointment with a psychiatrist.

“At first she was amenable to that, but when I actually made the appointment and it was time to go, she said ‘I’m not going. I’m not going to see him. I’ll leave.’ And I didn’t think she would leave and she left, and she’s been homeless ever since.”

While she never got treatment or a diagnosis, Bob believes his sister had schizophrenia.

“She never acknowledged that she was sick. She would never accept or seek out help. But the problem with mental illness is that without treatment your chances of functioning in society are just about impossible,” he said.

Carol chose to live on the streets of Arlington, Virginia, almost never going to shelters. Instead, she had several favorite bus stops. That’s where she caught the eye of Lamont Mitchell, who lived nearby.

“She was sharp-dressing homeless woman with class and a little sophistication. … with those cool sunglasses and she always wore black,” Mitchell said.

Tricia Sauer calls Mitchell one of their “Arlington angels,” neighbors and church members who looked out for Carol.

Mitchell said at first, Carol rejected his attempts at friendship, but over time he won her trust.

“She did eventually warm up to me,” he said. “She would accept a little bag of trail mix. So I was grateful for that.”

Mitchell eventually met Bob Sauer, and they exchanged phone numbers. He would give him updates on Carol, especially when it was cold. Bob and Tricia said they would find her and take her home.

“We’d have nice meals together and play Scrabble,” Tricia Sauer said. “Nothing we could do would convince her to stay and she would walk 25 miles back to … Arlington and it didn’ t matter if it was 105 degrees or 5 below and there was just nothing we could do to stop her.”

One time on a 17-degree night, they tracked her down and took her to the magistrate seeking an emergency commitment order, hoping to demonstrate, as required by Virginia law, she was endangering herself.

The measure would have gotten her a mental health evaluation at a hospital, but the magistrate turned them down.

“He said, ‘Oh, well, you know when you are homeless, you don’t have to worry about paying bills, you have a lot of freedom…’ And we were, you know our mouths just dropped open. This is how you are going to treat a person who is going to freeze to death?”

“That’s one of the first times early on when we went, ‘This is, this is a hopeless battle that we are trying to fight,” she said.

Still, they never gave up. Neither did Path Forward, an Arlington agency that serves those experiencing homelessness.

In December, finally, Carol filled out the paperwork to move into an apartment Path Forward had lined up for her.

But before she could move in, she fell ill.

Mitchell visited her at the hospital.

“I said ‘You’re safe. You are in a safe place. You’re OK.”

Carol died on New Year’s Eve from pneumonia and sepsis.

“It just hurt because she had such a hard life. That was, that was hard for me. Her dying, that was sad, but her living was sad,” Mitchell said.

Bob and Tricia published her obituary hoping it would spur conversation and maybe even bring change.

“So I didn’t want her to die in anonymity and just forget about it. Hopefully somebody else will see this and maybe we start a conversation. Maybe people who fall between the cracks, maybe there’s a way we can help them,” Bob Sauer said.

Carol’s memorial service is set for April 29. It would have been her 67th birthday.

Go here to read her obituary.