Through The Cracks | Episode 3: Kicked Out (Transcript) 

Jonquilyn Hill: I​ 'm Jonquilyn Hill and from WAMU PRX, this is Through The Cracks, a 
podcast about the gaps in our society and the people who fall through them.  

Relisha Rudd: R
​ -E-L-I-S-H-A. 

Jonquilyn Hill: T
​ his season on Through The Cracks, we're investigating the 
disappearance of Relisha Rudd. Relisha disappeared when she was eight years old 
while her family was living in a homeless shelter in southeast D.C. It took 18 days for 
anyone to realize she was missing.  

We'll look at the world Relisha grew up in. Her school, the shelter where she lived, 
her family.  

Antonio Wheeler: ​When I was a kid, I was quiet. I hid a lot of stuff in. And that's 
another reason why I'm always angry, because I held a lot of my childhood feelings 
in, too. 

Jonquilyn Hill: W
​ e're going back to the months and even years before Relisha went 
missing to determine if her disappearance was really, as the city claimed, 
unpreventable. 

Patrick Madden, WAMU: I​ think everyone realized they effed up. 

Jonquilyn Hill: Y
​ eah.  

Patrick Madden: E
​ veryone and no one wanted to take responsibility for this. 

Jonquilyn Hill: O
​ n today's episode: Eviction. The eviction that unhoused Relisha's 
family.  

Jonquilyn Hill: I​ wanted to find out how Relisha ended up in a shelter with her 
family. So I met up with Relisha's stepdad Antonio Wheeler on a hot summer day. 
We went to Oxon Run Park in southeast D.C. It's near the place he's sharing with his 
brother now. It was right after Labor Day weekend, so the garbage cans near a picnic 
table were stuffed to the brim and beyond with trash from the weekend's cookouts. 
Someone even left a grill behind. 

Back in 2012, Antonio, his then fiancee, Shamika, Relisha, and her three little brothers 
lived in an apartment on Brandywine Street in Congress Heights, a nearby 
neighborhood. 

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Antonio Wheeler: ​When I was a kid, I lived on Brandywine too. The same street, in 
the same building, but just upstairs. 

Jonquilyn Hill: I​ walked around this neighborhood. Brandywine Street is lined with 
trees and there are mostly houses with a few small apartment buildings. Nothing 
super tall, maybe four stories. Relisha could have walked the four blocks to her 
elementary school. Ferebee Hope. 

Antonio Wheeler: ​Yeah, it was really spacious. It had a living room, a dining room, 
and three bedrooms, and a bathroom. I let her draw on her walls in her way 
because, you know, we didn't have a lot of money to decorate it the way that we 
wanted to. So we let her do at her will – "Decorate your room. Do what you want to 
it. I'll just repaint it after we move or whatever.”  

Jonquilyn Hill: R
​ elisha got her own room because she was the only girl. Antonio 
remembers their year in that apartment as a happy time.  

Antonio Wheeler: ​We had pizza night, we had cereal night, and as we called it, a 
cereal date. "Kids, do you wanna have a cereal date tonight? 'Yeah, let's have a 
cereal date!'" You know, we just eat cereal. All day, all night. So, like, we will all go in 
the kitchen, get your own box of cereal, we sit in a circle, put the cartoons on and we 
eat cereal until you couldn't eat no more. 

Jonquilyn Hill: G
​ olden Grahams, Frosted Flakes, Captain Crunch. And then there 
was Relisha's favorite.  

Antonio Wheeler: ​They like the Lucky Charms, bleh. 

Jonquilyn Hill: I​ 'm not here to defend Lucky Charms. I've always been a Golden 
Grahams girl myself. But, in any case, as they were munching their cereal or eating 
their pizza, Antonio says the apartment around them was falling apart. 

Antonio Wheeler: ​Pipes in the walls started busting. So the landlord came through 
and, you know, he basically tried to make us pay for the damages saying that my 
son did something to the pipes. He was two at the time. 

So I'm like, excuse me, sir, let me let me ask you a question, because I lay carpet too 
and I do, you know, work like that. So I said, how could he bust the pipes if the pipes 
in the middle of the wall to the bathroom was up on the wall right here? How can 
he bust it? How could he bust that? He couldn't answer that. So I'm like, OK, so I had 
old pipes in here. Just admit that I had old pipes, sir. So don't blame my kids for it. 

Jonquilyn Hill: A​ ntonio says the landlord avoided doing a lot of repairs, so he ended 
up fixing a lot of things himself. 

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Antonio Wheeler: ​They had a furnace set in there where it developed this brick of 
ice, block of ice on the side of it and the person who took care of the apartment 
would always come and hit it with a hammer and a screwdriver to break the ice up. 
So the sort of AC can work. So I was doing it a couple of times until one day the 
system started sparking and something caught a fire. So I had to get the 
extinguisher to get it out. Long story short, I told him that we wasn't paying no more 
rent until you properly fixed this problem. 

Jonquilyn Hill: I​ spoke with someone who did work in the building but who didn't 
want to be identified by name. While they didn't say anything about icy furnaces or 
hammers and screwdrivers, they weren't surprised by Antonio's story. This person 
told me that leaks in the cooling weren't uncommon. The building wasn't in the 
greatest condition. On a scale from one to 10, this person gave it a four.  

D.C. tenants have the right to withhold rent until a landlord makes repairs, but when 
Antonio threatened not to pay the rent, he says the landlord dropped a huge bomb 
on them.  

Antonio Wheeler: ​I didn't know since we moved in that unit, Miss Shamika Young 
has not been paying the bills. Before the pipes and the AC unit started 
malfunctioning, she was never paying the bills. And I would give her the money to 
pay the bills; I was working at Ben and Jerry's at the time.  

Jonquilyn Hill: I​ called the landlord.​ ​He didn't agree to go on tape, so I'm going to 
summarize what he said.  

He actually doesn't have any recollection of Antonio. He does remember Shamika, 

though. He's not a landlord anymore, but when he was, he said he was managing 
several properties and had to deal with a lot of tenants. He remembers that a lot of 
his tenants were Black, like he is, and he hated the idea of putting them out on the 
street. But eventually he couldn't afford to keep people in apartments without 
paying. The landlord remembers Shamika missing about four months of rent before 
he moved forward with an eviction. He says that, because Shamika had a housing 
subsidy, the apartment was inspected before she moved in. He also says that 
Shamika didn't report any problems with her apartment.  

We wanted to hear what Shamika, Relisha's mother, remembers about the 

apartment, but she hasn't responded to our request to interview her. Shamika's 
mother, Melissa, remembers a different problem with the landlord than Antonio 
does, which might explain why Shamika was not paying the rent. 

Melissa Young: H​ er youngest son. He has real bad severe asthma. Every day on a 
daily basis. Emergency room visits, emergency room visits. Kind of found out it was 

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the carpet. When they instructed him to take the carpet up, that's when he put my 
daughter out. 

Jonquilyn Hill: T
​ hat's Melissa's recollection, at least. The landlord denies that it 
happened this way. In any case, everyone agrees on what happened next.  

Antonio Wheeler: ​We got evicted.  

I wake up that morning. I see the U.S. Marshals outside. So I tell Shamika, "didn't we 
just go to court?" 

Jonquilyn Hill: I​ n most cities, it's the sheriff who evicts people. But in D.C., we don't 
have a sheriff. We have the U.S. Marshals. Once the U.S. Marshals are at your door, 
there's no avoiding eviction. They can force entry legally into your home and trying 
to resist can get you arrested. 

Antonio Wheeler: ​That day was horrific. Had all my things outside. People would 
come up and take our stuff. You know, I got all the important things out the way, 
like the bed, our TV, the video games, the kids' toys, all that stuff wasn't outside. But 
our clothes and some shoes and stuff, yeah, people was coming up, taking our 
furniture, you know. I was like, go 'head, y'all saving me money for not putting it in 
storage in a way, but in a sense I was mad because that's money –hard earned 
money that I work for, you know. But that day was...I'm not gonna forget it. 

Jonquilyn Hill: T
​ his eviction was a turning point in Relisha's life. Up 'til now, her 
family had a place to live and the stability that comes from having a permanent 
address. But eviction can have dramatic consequences for individuals and for 
families.  

Matthew Desmond, “Evicted”: ​I'm now convinced that eviction is a cause, not just 
a condition of poverty. It makes things worse. 

Jonquilyn Hill: M
​ atthew Desmond is a sociologist and author of "Evicted: Poverty 
and Profit in the American City." He says eviction is so traumatic, it can lead to 
depression and suicide. Here he is on The Diane Rehm Show, back in 2016. 

Matthew Desmond, “Evicted”: ​You know, people lose their communities, children 
lose their schools. We have good evidence that workers often lose their jobs. And 
anyone listening out there who's been through an eviction, or through foreclosure, 
can I can tell you why. It's such a consuming, overwhelming, stressful event. It can 
cause you to make mistakes at work and eventually lose that job.  

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Jonquilyn Hill: T
​ he cost of losing your stuff or putting it into storage, of finding a 
new place to live, can thrust people really quickly into poverty. It can take at least 
two years to recover from an eviction – if you recover from it at all.  

Matthew Desmond, “Evicted”: ​And we have evidence that mothers who were 
evicted experience higher rates of depression two years later. So you add that all up, 
right? And you're left with a really strong picture, how eviction is driving people 
deeper into poverty and making their lives much harder.  

Antonio Wheeler: ​My kids asking me all kinds of questions like, Daddy, are we 
going to have another place to live, like where are we going to go? 

Jonquilyn Hill: T
​ his wasn't the first time that Antonio had been through an eviction. 
His family had been kicked out of their apartment when he was a kid. And according 
to court documents, it wasn't Shamika's first time having issues with the landlord 
either. And because eviction set the family up for so many other problems, I wanted 
to know if there was anything that could have been done to prevent this eviction 
from happening.  

I logged on to the D.C. Court database –anyone can– and did a search for Shamika 
Young. And I found out that this 2012 eviction from the apartment on Brandywine 
was her fifth time in tenant court. Beyond that, though, I wasn't exactly sure what 
any of these records were telling me. 

Now, I'm one of about three people in D.C. who is not a lawyer. So I called Beth 
Mellen Harrison. To help me decode what exactly I was seeing. She works for a 
nonprofit called Legal Aid. Her clients are low-income renters who find themselves in 
housing court and need legal help. 

Our meeting started with the normal pandemic Zoom awkwardness. But after a 
minute or two, my computer finally started cooperating and Beth was able to help 
me out.  

Beth Mellen Harrison: Y

​ eah, the court, the website is wonky sometimes. 

Jonquilyn Hill: Y
​ eah, so this is the first one, Norman Ditzen versus Shamika Young?  

Beth Mellen Harrison: S

​ o in this case, a default was entered against Miss Young. 

Jonquilyn Hill: T​ he first record I pulled is from January 2006. Relisha would have 
been a baby, about three months old. It's for nonpayment of rent. But in the end, 
Shamika wasn't evicted. The second case from 2006 got dismissed too. Shamika's 
first actual eviction happened in 2008, when Relisha was two. It took about three 

5
months to work through the eviction process. In the red is the order for the eviction 
to happen.  

Here's where D.C. eviction laws get tricky. At the time we're talking about, all 
landlords had to do was give a tenant a 75-day window for their eviction. This is the 
equivalent of saying the repairman is coming sometime between March and the 
middle of May. So, be alert. 

Renters facing eviction like Shamika had a serious calculation to make. Do they 
move immediately and start paying rent in a new place or do they risk it and 
continue to stay in their apartment not paying rent until the U.S. Marshal comes?  

Beth Mellen Harrison: N

​ ow, you know, the writ was returned and it says canceled. 
And so, up and through the kind of entire court process, landlords do not always go 
forward with cases.  

Jonquilyn Hill: C
​ ourt documents don't tell you everything. We can't tell, for example, 
whether Shamika got out of her apartment before her landlord threw her stuff out. 
That happens a lot. A tenant will know an eviction is coming and find a new home 
before their stuff ends up on the curb. 

There are a couple more of Shamika's court proceedings to go over. One from 2011 
when Relisha was five, another eviction – Shamika's second. And then the last one 
we see is from 2012, the apartment on Brandywine. 

I tell Beth about the disagreement that Antonio and Melissa have over the eviction, 
whether it was because of the carpet or about Shamika just not paying the rent.  

Beth Mellen Harrison: W ​ ell, I can say generally that when we talk to tenants who 
are facing eviction, in any kind of case –nonpayment of rent or lease violation case– 
the majority of them, the vast majority of them, have repair needs. 

Jonquilyn Hill: I​ f your apartment needs repairs, you can use that as a defense in 
tenant court. So if Shamika had a complaint about the carpet, she may have refused 
to pay rent until the landlord addressed her complaint. The record shows that she 
was evicted because she didn't pay rent, but it doesn't give any insight into why it 
wasn't paid. 

Beth Mellen Harrison: C​ arpet is a fascinating example because there are 

regulations in D.C. about various housing conditions and there's actually nothing 
that addresses carpet, really. 

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Jonquilyn Hill: M
​ ostly this eviction record looks the same as the others. Shamika 
doesn't show up for the first hearing. Then she asks for more time. But there is 
something here that makes this record a little different.  

Beth Mellen Harrison: Y

​ ou can see a line that says, L & T branch, temporary 
attorney appearance. But that means an attorney helped her on that date.  

Jonquilyn Hill: A​ pro bono attorney, someone like Beth. Most tenants go without any 
representation in tenant court whatsoever. Shamika was taking steps to avoid 
eviction. It gets at one of the questions I had for Beth: If anything more could have 
been done?  

Jonquilyn Hill: I​ t looks like she fought pretty hard for this last one in particular. 

Beth Mellen Harrison: Y ​ eah, and what I would say is, courts want these cases to be 
decided on the merits. And what that means, what I mean by that, what the court 
means by that is, even if a party misses a court date, doesn't do something 
procedurally that they're supposed to, if they then come back in a court and say, 
wait a minute, this is my home, I have things to say about this. I don't think I owe all 
this money for these reasons, there was supposed to be a really heavy thumb on the 
scale of letting that case have a trial. 

Jonquilyn Hill: S​ hamika's eviction case did not go to trial. And because the public 
filing doesn't show exactly what was said in court, we can't tell how much the 
attorney pushed for a trial. Or for that matter, if Shamika provided evidence that the 
carpet was an issue. 

Beth Mellen Harrison: B ​ ased on what you were telling me the family has said, one 
of those issues would be: Did the tenant request that the carpet be changed? 
Should the carpet have been changed? Were there other conditions in the home? 
Especially for a child with asthma, there are any number of conditions that might 
have aggravated or even caused the asthma. Was there mold? Was there 
infestation? And there may have been other issues as well. 

Jonquilyn Hill: O
​ ther issues that could have swayed a jury to decide this case in 
Shamika's favor, stop the eviction and decrease the amount of money the landlord 
was asking for if he hadn't made repairs.  

Beth said there was one more thing Shamika may have qualified for: emergency 
rent assistance, a last resort. The District budgets a certain amount of money every 
year to give to people who need help with their rent in emergency situations, like 
eviction. The problem is, assistance money runs out. Usually during the summertime, 
about three or four months before the end of the fiscal year in September. 

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Beth Mellen Harrison: T
​ he one kind of citywide program that's available to help 
you as a tenant may not even have money left, and it's just because it's 
underfunded. 

Jonquilyn Hill: S​ hamika's landlord filed a complaint in March, but Shamika wasn't 
kicked out of the apartment until the end of July. If she applied then, the fund had 
likely run out. 

Beth Mellen Harrison:​ I know you asked me, like, what more could she have done, 
but I kind of want to focus instead on what more could the system do for somebody 
like Ms. Young. To make sure that she doesn't fall through the cracks, to make sure 
when somebody is being evicted, that we have confidence that that is...That's the 
right decision or the only decision, the only outcome that is possible in this situation. 

Jonquilyn Hill: M
​ aybe the family wouldn't have been evicted if there was more 
money in the rent assistance pool. Maybe they wouldn't have been evicted if 
Shamika had shown up at every court date, or maybe, if the case went to trial, the 
eviction would have been canceled altogether. 

Before we get back to Relisha and her family, I want to point out that D.C. has a 
reputation for being a tenant-friendly city, even though it's extremely hard to find an 
affordable place to live. D.C. is fairly progressive when it comes to tenants rights, 
compared to other cities. If a landlord wants to sell or tear down a building, tenants 
are guaranteed first dibs on the property. They can buy it before it goes on the 
market. And if a landlord tries to raise rent, tenants can legally challenge that. But 
neither of these situations apply to Shamika. Not everyone has the resources to take 
advantage of D.C.'s tenant protections. These progressive policies weren't enough to 
keep Shamika housed. No city is progressive enough to keep every person in 
Shamika's situation from losing their apartment and falling through the cracks. 

After the break, Relisha's family figures out where to stay after getting kicked out of 
their apartment. We'll be right back. 

– 

Jonquilyn Hill: W
​ e've been working on Through The Cracks for a long time, and just 
when we hit our groove, a pandemic came along. Sound familiar? For this podcast, 
adapting to COVID life meant new equipment, a lot of interviews in public parks and 
turning my closet into a makeshift studio. There's no way we could have changed 
our plans without the generosity of our funders, including listeners just like you. You 
make this kind of investigative reporting possible. And if you want to contribute 
directly to Through The Cracks right now, I'd be incredibly grateful. You can donate 
at WAMU.org/SupportThroughTheCracks, and thanks.  

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 – 

Antonio Wheeler: ​Relisha was real smart. So Relisha asked me, Daddy, where are 
we gonna go now? I said, I don't know, boo. We're gonna try to go to a family 
member house until we can get our own spot. She said, OK. And then she asked me 
how long we were going to be without a house, because she had her own room. She 
wanted her own space. So I was like, I don't know. I don't know, daughter. I don't 
know. I can't answer that. 

Jonquilyn Hill: I​ t's difficult to piece together what happened to the family 
immediately after they were evicted. At some point, Relisha lived out of a car with 
her mother and at least one of her brothers. But Relisha wasn't completely detached 
from her old life. The cheerleading coach at her elementary school, Shannon Smith, 
took an interest in her. 

Shannon Smith: ​I grab Relisha and brought her to the team because she was 
homeless and they slept in the car. And I just grabbed her one day. I told her, 
watched them and she watched and then she said, I'm ready. I said, You ready? I 
said, let's go. So I did a one-on-one with her and she did great. She split, she jumped. 
And every time she would do something, she'd be just so happy. It would just make 
her day. Then, we came to the point where I just started changing her clothes for 
her because I wanted her to look like everybody else. 

We would go into the bathroom when the parents pulled up. They would pull up 
here in the bathroom as soon as you come in the building, I'll take her in the 
bathroom, we take our little bath there. She could dance with her new clothes, so 
she fits right in with the rest of them. And you couldn't tell or nothing because she 
started opening up then and she started having more friends. And then next thing 
you know, she's always walking down the hall, clapping and doing her cheers. But 
she stayed in line, she was never disrespectful. We never had a problem with her. 
She was too sweet. 

Jonquilyn Hill: F
​ or Antonio, the eviction triggered his own childhood trauma. 

Antonio Wheeler: ​I mean, I've been evicted before, with my mom, as a child. 

Jonquilyn Hill: A
​ ntonio's family was evicted from that same apartment building on 
Brandywine Street. And here he was, going through the same thing with his own 
kids. 

Antonio Wheeler: ​That was another mental issue I had to deal with because I 
reached out to family members for us to come stay at they house. You know, all of 
them told me the same thing when I got evicted. 

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Jonquilyn Hill: A​ ntonio's family would offer to take Antonio and the two younger 
boys in, but not Shamika, Relisha or her little brother. That was just too many people. 
And besides, they weren't all blood related. And me, I was a family-oriented type of 
dude, so I'm not gonna leave them and let them take my kids. So, we went to stick 
together. So we went to Shamika's sister's house after we got evicted. You know, we 
was there for like three months. Sister Ashley. 

Ashley Young: M
​ y sister, her kids and her baby father were staying with me in a one 
bedroom. It was small, but I didn't want them in a shelter.  

Jonquilyn Hill: A
​ shley Young is one of Shamika's younger sisters, Relisha's auntie. 
Her home was known as baby bootcamp. It's possible that Shamika or Antonio tried 
to find housing on their own, but if they filled out a lease application, it's likely that 
the landlord would have looked up their eviction records just like I did. And seeing 
Shamikas five records from tenant court would have been a red flag for some 
landlords, even though not all those cases ended up in an actual eviction. Instead, 
they depended on the generosity of family. 

Antonio Wheeler: ​From there, went to Ashley's house for three months. Like I 
said...Ashley's house for three months. After the three months, she put us out. It got 
cold. She put us out saying my kids don't never go to sleep, we don't discipline our 
kids, we don't beat our kids. And I didn't, you know, I only disciplined them when 
they really, really needed it. You know, I let them be kids.  

Jonquilyn Hill: A
​ shley says she housed them as long as she could. She was on 
housing assistance and her landlord said she couldn't have that many people 
staying with her for an extended period of time. Ashley says, eventually, her landlord 
forced the family out of her apartment.  

Antonio Wheeler: ​It was Shamika's idea to go to the shelter. I didn't want to go, but 
she just asked because I was so sick of people kept putting this out and it was 
snowing and we had kids.  

So it's like, OK. 

Jonquilyn Hill: T
​ hat's next time on Through The Cracks. 

Antonio Wheeler: ​Y'all feeding us spoiled milk and moldy food. We had to cut hot 
dogs open to see if it was molded on the inside. 

Lakia Barnett, DC General resident: ​You know, why will we have to go here? Look 
at this place; it’s an old hospital. I'm just being transparent. Old hospital. And you 
guys got a bunch of families in here? Like, no. 

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Jamila Larson, Playtime Project: W ​ e were constantly bumping up against the 
clear reality that the children in D.C. General were not valued.  

Jonquilyn Hill: T
​ hrough The Cracks is a production of WAMU and PRX. This podcast 
was made possible in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private 
corporation funded by the American people, and also the Fund for Investigative 
Journalism. Patrick Fort is our producer. Ruth Tam is our digital editor. Poncie 
Rutsch is our senior producer. Our editor is Curtis Fox. Mike Kidd makes this episode. 
Osei Hill designed our logo. Monna Kashfi oversees all the content we make here at 
WAMU. Our website is WAMU.org/ThroughTheCracks. There, you can check out a 
map of key locations in Relisha's disappearance. You can also sign up for our 
newsletter. So you'll be the first to know whenever we share bonus content. This 
podcast would not be possible without the generosity of listeners like you. To 
support the investigative reporting that powers through the cracks, give at 
WAMU.org/SupportThroughTheCracks. I'm Jonquilyn Hill. We'll be back next 
Thursday with another episode. Thanks for listening. 

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