Content warning: This story contains a description of suicide. Reader discretion is advised.
If you need help, dial 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. You can also reach the Colorado Crisis Services hotline at 1-844-493-8255 or text "TALK" to 38255 to speak with a trained counselor or professional. Counselors are also available at walk-in locations or online to chat.
Darrius Davis' phone rang around 9 p.m. on the last Thursday in October 2022.
"You're good on rent, son?" his mom Jenifer Davis asked on the other end of the line. Over the past few months, Darrius, 25, had needed her help, and she and others in the family had delivered.
"Yeah, Mom," Darrius answered, ignoring the eviction letters stuffed between books, under the couch and on the closet shelf in the home where he recorded the podcast "Just a Regular Guy." On the show, he offered fellow Black men mental-health advice. "I've just got to pay for November's rent."
His uncle, who was watching sports with Darrius, said he'd loan him $300 when he got paid the next day. Before dawn Friday morning, his uncle left for work.
Hours later, Denver Sheriff deputies arrived at 93 S. Pearl St., to evict Darrius.
Image Source: Denver Sheriff's Department
Movers waited outside the 1898 triplex, ready to pack his belongings. A representative from his landlord, the Denver real-estate investment company Osage Properties Group, was there to take back the apartment.
A deputy wearing blue surgical gloves knocked on his door eight times.
"Denver Sheriff's Department," she said, in body camera footage Denverite reviewed.
Darrius held a gun and hid inside his home.
The deputy knocked seven more times.
"Denver Sheriff's Department," she repeated. "Is there anyone in there?"
Darrius remained silent.
"Sheriff's Department," she said again. "Is there anyone in there?"
Another deputy took out his handgun and turned on his pistol flashlight.
"Sheriff's Department," he said. "Sheriff's Department."
They turned the knob and continued to ask anybody inside to show themselves.
A security chain blocked the entrance.
A deputy shined his pistol light into the dark through a crack in the door. There was a candle on the floor, cups, paper bags, trash and a fan.
A gunshot rang out.
The deputies took cover. They didn't return fire. They called the police for help.
When officers arrived, they found Darrius dead in the closet of an apartment he could not afford.
Police inspectors arrived to take evidence. The city removed Darrius from his home in a sealed body bag.
That night his family built a short-lived shrine outside the triplex. Soon after, that too was cleared, and the apartment was back in the hands of Osage Properties Group.
Landlord and investor M. Kirk Scott planned to develop the land beneath the triplex in the up-and-coming Speer neighborhood.
Osage's website, which Denverite reviewed, was already advertising to investors the boutique apartments that would replace Darrius' home, promising residents "peaceful living" and "tremendous value to an under served price point."
Until those plans unfolded, Scott, who did not respond to requests for comment, could rent out Darrius' apartment again.
Had this eviction gone as planned, it would have been wrapped in under two hours.
The deputies would have offered Darrius a list of resources, and he'd be left to fend for himself -- either find a place to crash with friends or family, go to a shelter or live on the streets.
The unit's locks would be changed.
The deputies would move on to their next appointment. They were busy evicting households -- roughly four a day last year as the number of people living without a home climbed.
Like most of the 2.45 million tenants evicted nationwide since mid-March of 2020 and the 1,665 people the Denver Sheriff Department removed last year, Darrius couldn't afford rent.
In Denver, housing counselors aren't required to meet with people facing evictions before a case goes to court. There is no mandatory mediation between renters and landlords. And when the deputies arrive for an eviction, they represent the city alone.
Social workers, housing counselors and mental health professionals aren't sent to evictions to evaluate if people losing their homes are risks to themselves or others or to help them avoid homelessness. Landlords are asked to warn the city of potential risks, but how would they know whether tenants were armed or a danger to themselves?
Family and friends don't always know what someone's going through.
Darrius' grandmother Kathy, who worked with people with severe mental illness, didn't worry about her grandson, she said at a memorial flag football game attended by more than 100 friends, family members and the amateur athletes he played with most weekends -- cheering on his opponents and teammates alike. She didn't see any signs that he was depressed.
"He was the light," his mom Jenifer said. "And he made everyone happy."
At the memorial game, football teams and coaches prayed and played. His family released balloons into the air. Everybody wondered what could have saved him.
"It's not like he didn't have community or people that loved him," said his cousin, the nonprofit leader Jose Silva.
"Everybody here talked to Darrius," his mother said. "Everybody here would help Darrius. Everybody here would give Darrius their last penny. But for some reason, he didn't feel good. He didn't feel comfortable reaching out or making that connection."
As a kid, Darrius spent time at the Boettcher Boys and Girls Club, the same one attended by his friend Elijah McClain, the 19-year-old who died after a violent interaction with Aurora Police in August 2019.
Younger kids looked up to Darrius, recalled former Boys and Girls Club staff member Emily Bobrick, who had known him since he was 10. Sometimes he was a role model for better and sometimes for worse. He talked trash and teased, but even more, he cared about people.
"He just loved to be out there having fun and was always there to pump somebody up and help them out," Bobrick said.
In his early 20s, he coached youth sports. He worked at McDonald's and Tokyo Joe's. On weekends, he'd party with roommates, drunkenly tossing his friends over his shoulder and wrestling them to the ground.
When McClain died in police custody, Darrius, who had never been arrested or received a speeding ticket and had been taught to speak respectfully to law enforcement, began to fear the police.
"That really put a fear into his heart, but simply because that's his friend," Jenifer said. "He's seen this happen to his friend."
During most of the pandemic, Darrius lived with his mother and moved out in May 2022.
By summer, his party days were largely over. He worked at a downtown restaurant and as a security guard. He lived by himself, relaxing alone. That wasn't his plan for the rest of his life.
"I want to be married," Darrius said on his podcast, "Just a Regular Guy." "I want one kid. I want a little boy. Name him Darrius."
So what went wrong?
Darrius paid $1,250 a month for his 350-square-foot home at 93 S. Pearl St. He fell behind a month in rent.
In August, Darrius' landlord and his landlord's attorney Mark Tschetter, the "supplier at large" for the Colorado Apartment Association and a partner at Tschetter Sulzer P.C., began the eviction process. Tschetter did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
In a template letter, they notified Darrius he would either need to pay or move out. Tschetter Sulzer P.C. calls itself "the #1 Eviction Firm in Colorado." Its lawyers have an efficient, cookie-cutter process for removing tenants from their homes.
The firm's approach has led to two active class-action lawsuits. In the most recent, filed by the Colorado Poverty Law Project, the claim stated that Tschetter Sulzer "created a scheme under which they systematically steal money under the guise of charging 'attorney fees' and 'court costs' -- typically $300-$500 -- from many hundreds of tenants in Colorado notwithstanding the tenants' cure of their nonpayment of rent."
Tschetter and Scott filed eviction paperwork with the Denver County Court, stating Darrius owed $450 on a deposit, a late fee of $50 and an attorney's fee of $598.
In total, once the eviction process started, Darrius owed Scott $2,323, according to court filings, far more than the rent he missed. He didn't have the money.
The tie between suicide and eviction has been demonstrated for decades across multiple studies.
Those studies include a 2014 report looking at an increase in suicides associated with evictions and foreclosures during the housing crisis from 2005 to 2010 in the American Journal of Public Health.
Financial concerns and unstable housing can be a risk factor for suicide, explained Courtney Lenard, a spokesperson for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
"CDC recommends that states and communities implement suicide prevention strategies and approaches with the best available evidence, including strengthening economic supports through strengthening household financial security and improving housing stabilization policies," she added.
Still, the relationship between rent-assistance programs and suicide reduction has been under-researched, according to a report from the CDC. But multiple studies show minimum wage hikes, stabilizing housing and housing-first models reduce suicide.
Neither the Denver Department of Public Health and Environment nor the Department of Housing Stability tracks data showing the mental health consequences of eviction or correlating suicides and evictions. Privacy laws for tenants make doing so even harder.
"The Medical Examiner does not track personal circumstances surrounding the deaths investigated," explained Tammy Vigil, a Department of Public Health and Environment spokesperson.
But the city does track the cause of death for people experiencing homelessness. Why not do the same with eviction status?
"We don't have access to records that would reveal whether the person who has died is in the process of being evicted or in foreclosure," Vigil explained. "Additionally, unless there is a specific reason listed in a suicide note, our investigators generally do not have access to the information to be able to objectively determine what caused the person to take their own life."
Denverite reviewed the eviction history of 120 of the 155 people who died by suicide in the city last year, and found that 19 had public eviction records in Colorado tied to their names. But that's an imperfect account. Some of those names might not be referring to the same person. Not all records include birthdates to match identities. Even if those individuals were the same, they may not have gone through the entire eviction process.
Other people who died by suicide and dealt with eviction are harder to identify. They may have had their records sealed. Some could have faced eviction out of state. And there is no way to track the number of people who moved out at the first sign that a landlord was considering eviction, but before court papers were filed.
What Denver County Court does track is the number of eviction filings -- cases that go to court.
"Eviction filings are merely the tip of the iceberg and do not reflect the actual number of Denver families displaced each month," explained a letter to Denver's new mayor sent by a coalition of more than 20 anti-poverty organizations, including the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless and the Community Economic Defense Project.
"Research suggests that for every eviction filing, two more households self-evict before a filing occurs, often due to landlord pressure," the letter continued.
A lack of data leaves policymakers with little understanding of the scope of the relationship between housing instability and suicide, or what the best approach to eviction would be.
"The federal government collects basically no data about evictions," explained Rutgers University sociology professor Peter Hepburn, who works with Princeton University's Eviction Lab. "There are some states that do collect data, but it's a relatively small number. Eviction cases are handled by county courts."
Darrius likely missed a chance to connect with help when he didn't attend his eviction court date.
As the notices appeared on his door, Darrius ignored them. He didn't even remove the tape. And he never showed up to court.
Had he gone to court, Darrius might have connected with an attorney through the city's rental defense program or found other resources as many in Denver do when facing eviction.
He didn't secure the federally funded emergency rental assistance that was available at the time.
"He never told me about an eviction," his mother said. Nor did he reach out to other family members, teammates or friends, several told Denverite.
If he had, Jenifer would have invited him back home. As would many others. But she said he was ashamed and "trying to be an adult about the situation," so he kept the eviction secret.
Like many, he lost his case by default and suffered the burden alone.
Denver's current approach to serving eviction leaves all crisis management -- from suicide and homelessness prevention to health care -- to armed sheriff's deputies. This is standard nationwide.
Social workers don't show up to help relocate an evicted tenant, nor do therapists, case managers, medical professionals, housing counselors or other co-responders. While evictions can often be the first step toward homelessness, neither the city's Department of Housing Stability or caseworkers from the many homelessness nonprofits the city contracts with come to the scene.
Instead, in Denver and in most cities, it's law enforcement: Armed deputies in uniform who remove people from their homes and offer services.
Major Deric Wynn, part of the Civil Unit in the Sheriff Department, acknowledged law enforcement is struggling to gain the community's trust, and he knows that the uniform signals a threat of arrest for some. Yet sending plain clothes deputies to carry out an eviction would be unthinkable.
"The uniform represents not just the professionalism of the city, that uniform represents the professionalism of the Denver Sheriff Department," Wynn said. "And our uniform represents help and opportunity."
Denverite reviewed footage from body cameras worn by deputies and Darrius' autopsy report. Both show that the department followed standard procedures.
The deputies spoke respectfully during what should have been a run-of-the-mill eviction. They did not shoot Darrius. They did not use excessive force. In fact, the body cam footage shows they did not come into contact with Darrius before the self-inflicted gunshot occurred.
As far as Wynn knows, the city is not currently having conversations about sending social workers, mental health professionals or housing counselors to eviction scenes. He doesn't see that as a priority, since many tenants connect with some support in court.
Most times when the deputies knock, the tenants aren't even there and will later return to an emptied home, said Wynn. When tenants are home, they usually comply and the deputies' resources are enough. People can panic, but they rarely do. Even fewer take up arms against themselves or others.
When tenants do resort to violence, the deputies are trained to respond, Wynn explained.
Denver Sheriff deputies don't do police work like some in other cities do, Wynn said. They carry out the will of the court.
In a completed eviction, the court is carrying out the will of a landlord.
Wynn said deputies aim to make the process as painless as possible, giving evicted tenants resources for shelter and other support. For many deputies in the field, carrying out evictions is among the most rewarding work they've done for the Sheriff's Department, according to Wynn.
"We're not there to make their life miserable," Wynn said. "We're there to help them in any way we can. And I don't think people understand that."
"The eviction process, in itself, kind of allows and creates these tense moments that escalate and lead to really awful situations," said journalist Juan Pablo Garnham, who works at the Eviction Lab and in the Department of Sociology at Princeton University.
Garnham has studied more than 120 eviction cases that led to violence.
"A lot of times these cases are treated like crime stories," he said. "In most cases, no one looks into the context of what happened, why we got there. No one talks about mental health issues because that means going deeper and asking people what's going on."
There's been a national conversation about police brutality and how cops can escalate situations with people experiencing mental health crises that might be better handled by a medical professional or a social worker. That has led to the creation of Denver's celebrated Support Team Assisted Response (STAR) Program. That team responds to mental health and substance misuse emergency calls that don't require an armed officer.
Garnham said the United States needs to have a parallel conversation regarding evictions. Perhaps they should be treated less like criminal cases that require a law-enforcement response and more like mental health or economic crises.
Violence occurs during evictions, said Garnham, "because we are letting this system and these kinds of tools handle things that we as a society don't want to take care of" -- such as poverty and mental health.
Garnham also supports mandatory mediation between landlords and tenants before eviction papers are filed with a court. Those would allow tenants in crisis to connect with systems that could support them and help them come to a resolution with their landlords.
Acknowledging that eviction is often part of a mental health crisis could also help avoid bad outcomes.
"There's an opportunity there to have alternative ways of dealing with it, whether that is a social worker, rather than someone with guns," Garnham said. "All of those are other options that could be considered that will help not only lower the tensions but avoid some really, really bad outcomes."
The entire eviction process takes a physical toll on individuals.
"Eviction is associated with a whole host of negative repercussions," Hepburn said. "So it's linked to increased incidents of respiratory conditions, high blood pressure, increases in depression, stress, suicidal ideation, increases in drug use. It's been linked directly to increased risk of homelessness, increased risk of job loss, and wage loss."
Even going to court for an eviction can lead to devastating consequences.
"One of the really pernicious effects of an eviction is that it creates a record," Hepburn said. "And so if you've been evicted or even if you've been filed against for eviction, but not actually formally evicted by the court, that record is going to make it harder for you to rent an apartment in the future. And it means that you're going to have to settle for a worse apartment in a worse neighborhood. And those sorts of long-term, neighborhood-level consequences that come with that are hard to measure."
Colorado has laws that largely favor landlords and "trails behind a large number of states in renter protections," despite meaningful reforms in recent years, said Zach Neumann, executive director of the Community Economic Defense Project. Those include privacy laws that conceal more recent eviction records if tenants win their cases or negotiate with the landlord to have their records concealed.
While Denver offers some protections, Philadelphia, for example, has a pandemic-era eviction-diversion program that requires mandatory mediation between landlords and tenants that owe less than $3,000. The parties have 30 days to agree on a resolution. During that time, tenants often connect with eviction-defense attorneys and housing counselors to help them stay housed and keep landlords paid. If the parties do not come to a resolution or the tenant does not show up to mediation, the landlord can file a case in court.
As housing costs and evictions have risen, the number of people experiencing homelessness has ballooned, said Jamie Rife, the executive director of the Metro Denver Homeless Initiative.
Her group estimates nearly 28,000 people accepted homelessness services in the area between July 1, 2021, and June 30, 2022. In the annual Point in Time Count, 5,818 people lived without a home in Denver on one night in late January 2023. The Point-in-Time Count reflects a fraction of those who face homelessness in a year, according to a report from the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty.
All renters face the possibility of eviction, but Black tenants are more likely to lose their homes than others, Hepburn said.
"From the numbers that we've calculated, eviction filing rates and eviction rates for Black renters are, in many cases, double those of white renters," Hepburn said. "That's especially true in larger urban counties."
During the early days of the pandemic, many worried evictions would spike as people lost wages and work. It was a fair concern, but evictions temporarily dropped because of federal action.
Congress, and later the CDC, declared limited eviction moratoriums in 2020. After the CDC's moratorium expired in August 2021, the federal government offered pandemic emergency rental assistance funds to keep people from falling into debt or losing housing. The assistance would ensure landlords could continue to pay their mortgages.
Through the pandemic, many landlords also did their part to keep people housed.
Landlords often prefer to negotiate with tenants than evict them because court costs are high, and striking a deal is better business than letting a unit sit empty.
"We are getting a sense that the emergency rental assistance that was passed at the beginning of 2021, the $47 billion, did a lot to keep people pretty stable," said Kathryn Reynolds of the Urban Institute. "So the spike in evictions that I think folks were expecting to see happen after the lifting of the national moratorium didn't happen, and I think in large part we feel like that had a lot to do with the fact that we actually had relief for renters that were in need."
As evictions dropped, so did Denver's apartment vacancy rate. High demand and fewer available apartments led to a climb in the price of rent during the first years of the pandemic. Landlords knew that if one tenant proved unprofitable, the next would likely be better and likely pay more.
Evictions began to rise again.
Last year, the number of eviction filings nearly reached pre-pandemic levels. This year, they've climbed higher. May 2023 saw 1,216 eviction filings, the most of any month in the past five years, according to Denver County Court data.
From July 2022 to June 2023, Denver saw 11,251 eviction filings, compared to 3,912 in 2020. From 2009 to 2019, the yearly average number of eviction filings was 8,999.
What has caused the rise in eviction cases? Rent has stayed high as pandemic-era, federally funded rental assistance was gutted after the money started running out last fall, making it even harder for eviction defense attorneys to keep tenants housed, said Neumann.
Housing affordability has been a big issue debated in the city and the state, but few new policies have been passed to address it.
In last November's election, Denver voters rejected the No Eviction Without Representation proposal that would have expanded free legal representation to all Denver tenants through a fee on landlords.
In the 2023 legislative session, Colorado lawmakers made multiple attempts to increase housing stability and affordability, protect workers' rights and boost the construction of new homes.
There was Just Cause for Eviction legislation that would make it harder and more expensive for landlords to boot tenants. The rules were partially modeled after President Joe Biden's White House Blueprint for a Renters Bill of Rights. That failed.
Another bill would have allowed municipalities to pass local rent control, capping how much landlords could raise the rent. That, too, failed.
Gov. Jared Polis pushed a massive land-use bill designed to increase the supply of new homes by removing local governments' power to limit new multi-unit housing through zoning.
"Housing policy is economic policy," he said in his January State of the State speech. "Housing policy is transportation policy. Housing policy is water policy. Housing policy is public health and equity policy."
That also failed.
Many in the business community, including at the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce and the Colorado Apartment Association, celebrated the defeat of Just Cause for Eviction and rent control, arguing both policies would have undermined the real estate industry's market-based solutions to the housing crisis.
Champions of local control relished defeating Polis' housing bill rooted in market-based solutions. Critics argued it gave the state too much power to change the character of local communities.
For tenants' rights and housing advocates, the defeats were a major blow and a sign that lawmakers didn't have the best interests of renters in mind.
"Throughout the 2023 legislative session, bills that would create systemic change on issues that primarily impact low-income Coloradans and communities of color have died," wrote Kate Countryman, a spokesperson for the Community Economic Defense Project. "The Colorado state legislature, with overwhelming Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, killed four proposals that would protect thousands of Coloradans across our state -- just cause for eviction, local control of rents, fair work week and gig-worker protections, transparency for metro districts, and the governor's land use bill."
Whether the policy changes lawmakers debated would have stopped Darrius' eviction or flagged his mental health issues cannot be known.
But even a cursory look at his Facebook page or a conversation with his mother prior to the eviction would have revealed he thought about depression and suicide.
Darrius occasionally wrote about mental health struggles on social media.
He quoted another person's post: "My brother died from depression. He also frequently exercised, had supportive friends/family, was successful in school & in work. He had goals that he was constantly reaching- he still killed himself. People who are depressed are not weak-minded- they are sick: Understand this."
A friend wrote, "As a man, your feelings don't matter bro so just figure it out." Darrius replied: "Say it again for the ones in the back."
"Black children drown in depression and cannot even talk to their families," Darrius wrote.
"We don't let Black men be vulnerable," Silva said. "We have to let our little Black and Brown boys and girls be vulnerable. Not in the sense that it's a weakness. Vulnerability is a gift."
Jenifer, Darrius' mom, was concerned that he would hurt himself based on conversations they had a month before his death. She reached out to the police non-emergency number to express concerns about his mental health and to seek help.
Even as his mother, she had no influence. "When he became 18, I became powerless," she said.
Authorities asked her if he was an immediate danger to himself or others, the legal standard that allows them to intervene. Not on the surface, she said. He had not made any suicidal or threatening statements, so she was told there was nothing the system could do without his consent.
Her emergency call was not on the radar of the Sheriff's Department, a spokesperson for the Department of Public Safety said.
Even if her call were entered into the system, it would not have been discovered ahead of the eviction, since there is no substantial investigation into a household's risks of violence before the sheriff knocks.
"By the time he was a danger to himself," Jenifer said, "it was too late."
If you need help, dial 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. You can also reach the Colorado Crisis Services hotline at 1-844-493-8255 or text "TALK" to 38255 to speak with a trained counselor or professional. Counselors are also available at walk-in locations or online to chat.
