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Around 11 a.m. on Sept. 4, a fight broke out in the basement of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church.
The church is home to the Downtown Day Services Center, a key gathering place for homeless people managed by the neighborhood’s Business Improvement District, and things were getting heated in the center’s cafeteria. According to witness accounts forwarded to Loose Lips, a BID outreach worker punched one of the center’s clients in the face after an argument, prompting a brief wrestling match.
“Eventually the BID worker got the client in a front headlock position and began to yell expletives and insults at the client,” according to a statement from a witness shared with the BID and later provided to LL. “That included, ‘What are you going to do now?’ while still having the client in a headlock.”
Security guards and other outreach workers on the scene quickly broke up the scuffle. But the resulting fallout roiled the BID and its partner organizations working on homelessness services downtown, according to internal emails and two sources familiar with the situation. Supervisors at the center raised concerns that “this is the second incident where [the BID worker] physically engaged a client,” and expressed doubt about his “ability to work safely in this environment,” per one email to the BID’s leaders.
Debra Kilpatrick Byrd, then the BID’s director of homeless services, followed up with an email on Sept. 18, arguing that her employee was “defending himself as he was being physically harmed by the consumer.” She added that she’d reported the incident to the police and filed the appropriate internal reports. “Please rest assured that I acknowledge the seriousness of these incidents and they were addressed immediately,” Byrd wrote.
By the next day, Byrd’s tune changed. She acknowledged that she “made an error” and that no reports had been filed either internally or with the Metropolitan Police Department. After gathering “additional details” and reviewing the witness statements submitted to the BID, she chose to put the BID employee on administrative leave. “I deeply regret that your team had this unfortunate experience,” Byrd wrote to another homeless outreach organization that works at the Day Services Center. (An MPD spokesperson tells LL they have no records of any report filed involving this incident at the center.)
Byrd and the worker involved in the scuffle have both left the BID’s employment in the weeks since this back-and-forth, a BID spokesperson tells LL. They declined to comment further, calling it a “personnel matter involving private information.”
The sources familiar with the dispute say the perception within the BID and its partner organizations is that Byrd sought to bury and quickly move past this incident, but that became untenable after video of the scuffle was shared with BID leaders. LL’s sources suspect this whole drama contributed to her departure.
This dustup didn’t happen in a vacuum. For more about how tensions are rising around homelessness downtown, as exacerbated by new policies at MLK Library, check out our full story online.
—Alex Koma (tips? akoma@washingtoncitypaper.com)
Editor’s note: City Paper is off for Indigenous Peoples’ Day. District Line Daily will return to your inboxes Tuesday.
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By City Paper Staff (tips? editor@washingtoncitypaper.com)
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By City Paper staff (tips? editor@washingtoncitypaper.com)
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By Sarah Marloff (tips? smarloff@washingtoncitypaper.com)
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