The 911 caller thought Trenton Harris had overdosed.
Slumped over a wooden Seattle park bench, his head down and arms limp — the call came in during the afternoon, 2:45 p.m., Seattle police reported, but his body had been there all day.
His mom, Jennifer Dobbins, said that she would have been prepared for a call like that. He had struggled with substance use disorder for years and was living outside at the time. But that wasn't the call she received.
Harris, 30, was fatally shot four times in July 2022. His death was ruled a homicide by the King County Medical Examiner's Office.
He was one of 18 homeless people who died by homicide in King County last year, a number that more than doubled from 2021. The jump is made more alarming because violence usually makes up a small portion of the ways homeless people die.
But 2022 was exceptionally brutal for people living outside. A record-setting 310 people died while homeless in Seattle and across King County, a 65% jump over 2021 and an increase of over 100 people from the previous record set in 2018 (195 deaths), according to medical examiner records.
"That's just appalling," said Chloe Gale, policy and strategy vice president for REACH, the largest homelessness outreach provider in Seattle.
The county's homeless death toll is an undercount because it relies on the Medical Examiner's Office, which only investigates people who died of sudden, unexpected or unnatural causes. Most people's cause of death is determined by a physician rather than a medical examiner.
Still, 2022 marked the sharpest increase in homeless deaths the county has ever reported, following years of counts that broke or approached records, only to be broken again.
In 2021, 188 homeless people died. And December 2020 set a recent record for the most people dying without housing in a single month, at 29, a number that seems small compared with 2022's monthly counts.
King County officials said it has recently directed Public Health — Seattle & King County to work with the county's Department of Community and Human Services and the King County Regional Homeless Authority to survey homeless service providers to learn more about what's working to mitigate the risk of fatal overdoses among their clients and to find out what more is needed. The county is also increasing funding to support harm-reduction work.
Beyond that, however, Seattle and homelessness officials said they don't have any specific plans to try to curb this trend. They instead pointed to existing law enforcement, public health harm reduction strategies, and shelter and housing efforts already planned.
Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell said these numbers underscore his administration's urgency to get more people indoors, working in collaboration with the King County Regional Homelessness Authority.
Anne Martens, spokesperson for the authority, said these deaths were "preventable" and that it's "a result of deep holes in our social safety net and an ongoing national opioid epidemic," and pointed to Public Health for solutions.
Public Health in 2022 distributed more than 10,000 naloxone kits — the drug reverses fentanyl overdoses — and about 100,000 fentanyl test strips. The agency is leading public awareness campaigns about the synthetic opioid, as well as helping people find treatment.
But no agency said it was focused specifically on the uptick in fatal violence.
The Seattle Police Department noted that homicides rose across all populations, with 56 criminal homicide investigations reported in 2022. Homeless people make up more than 32% of those.
Agency officials declined to say what could be causing this increase or whether combating the rise in violent deaths for homeless people requires different strategies than for housed people.
Some homelessness outreach workers said that as the pandemic made informal work, like odd jobs, harder to get, , such as selling drugs to maintain their habit.
And often, these industries are regulated by force.
Dobbins, who lives in Bonney Lake, doesn't know who or what led to her son's killing six months ago, and Seattle police have not publicly released any information.
Dobbins said she found out three days after her son was found dead in Kobe Terrace park in the Chinatown International District. He didn't have an ID on him, so they had to identify him using his fingerprints, she said.
After Harris became homeless and couldn't keep hold of a cellphone, Dobbins would show up in Seattle on the same day every month to meet him. She would take him out for pizza. Bring him fresh socks and a Mountain Dew. No matter what kind of shape he was in, she would give him a hug and a kiss.
Harris entered treatment several times for opioids, but it never stuck.
"I was worried all the time," Dobbins said.
Before she left for home, Dobbins would take a selfie with her oldest child. She has loads of them on her phone. He was using fentanyl at the time of his death and living outside, and she wanted to have recent photos in case he ever came up missing.
Fentanyl-related fatal overdose deaths made up more than half of all reported deaths of homeless people in 2022. The Medical Examiner's Office found many people had a combination of fentanyl and other drugs, such as meth or cocaine, in their system.
The synthetic opioid — which is easy to produce and currently cheap to buy — is driving a national epidemic that crosses social and economic borders.
As of November, fentanyl was involved in 70% of all confirmed overdose deaths, regardless of housing status, last year in King County, compared with less than 10% before 2018, according to a recent report by Public Health — Seattle & King County.
Brad Finegood, who leads the opioid and overdose response for Public Health, said researchers keep watching the monthly overdose numbers, hoping to see rates plateau.
"Maybe we're plateauing at a really bad rate and maybe it's going to get worse," Finegood said. "I don't know when it's going to stop."
On the longest night of the year, during one of Seattle's coldest weeks, Dobbins joined more than 50 people gathered outside Seattle City Hall to remember every person who died while homeless in 2022. Joined by four other family members that evening, she stood on Seattle City Hall's steps, holding a white poster board with her son's name written in black.
At the time, the Solstice Vigil's organizers, WHEEL and Women in Black, handed out pamphlets with 269 names. It should be 270, organizers said, because they had just learned a man died, blocks from where they stood the night before.
"The long emergency of homelessness keeps getting worse, not better, while politicians posture and governments plan a new initiative and housing comes with agonizing slowness," Michael Ramos, executive director of the Church Council of Greater Seattle, said at the event.
Many people died from common symptoms of homelessness — compounding health effects that come from living without stable housing or regular medical care.
Ten people died from hypothermia or environmental exposure, according to the medical examiner. Seven died from suicide. And many more died from natural causes, at a much younger age than is typical.
The average age of death for people presumed homeless in King County last year was 48, according to the medical examiner's report.
While drug use always ranks high as a driver of deaths for people who are homeless, these other factors cause the majority of deaths in average years.
Paige Killinger, who oversees homeless outreach in Sodo for REACH, said that for many of her clients, getting into housing is a matter of life and death.
Killinger said her team worked with a client this fall to find housing using an Emergency Housing Voucher, which the federal government created as part of the American Rescue Plan Act to get more people into permanent housing.
The client was one day from moving into her new space, Killinger said, when she died from overdose.
She kept telling caseworkers that if she stayed on the streets, she'd die, Killinger said.
"And she did," she said.
It's exhausting, Killinger said, for people working in homeless services — which have seen significant labor shortages during the pandemic — to be so close to so much preventable death and despair.
"It's hard to keep people in this work when it's constant death," she said.
