When Harvard Square’s Y2Y youth homeless shelter closed for the season, six young adults, three of them trans, moved to a camp by Medford’s Wellington T station.
Despite the warming weather, it’s been an especially difficult month for the group: Its members face eviction or arrest Friday from a threatened MBTA Transit Police sweep in the wake of a fire set next to the camp and its inhabitants.
Y2Y, the country’s first student-run youth homeless shelter, has a basement facility on Church Street in Cambridge that hosts half of all youth shelter beds in Greater Boston. It closes for four months of the year, displacing the approximately 24 youth staying there nightly.
While some of the group staying by Wellington Station for the past three months intend to go back when Y2Y reopens June 15, at least one has turned 25 and is no longer eligible. All face at least two weeks with nowhere to go.
Speaking for this story, several campers and at least one local housing advocate named the site as one where police have accommodated homeless encampments for years. The MBTA reportedly gave the group permission to stay. Now the Medford camp may be lost for good as a result of the May 10 fire.
Camp resident Mason Skyfall said he’d just finished cooking and was listening to music when he noticed a man in a clearing just north of the tents. The man was igniting a large trash pile. Flames broke out just before 11 p.m.
Skyfall said he saw the running culprit “pouring a gas canister everywhere” before dropping it, partially full, into the flames.
“Hey, someone’s lighting the camp on fire,” Skyfall recalled yelling. The campers rushed to throw their limited supply of water on the smoking heap, trying to avoid a 911 call that could lead to police evacuating them.
Firefighters to the rescue
It was in vain. The fire started “popping” and “crackling,” with the gas can the assailant dropped exploding. Skyfall said it was hot enough to melt through “shopping carts in a minute and a half.”
The tent closest to the fire belonged to Jahzmine, a young mother who is pregnant with her second child. She said she struggles to find food, and noted that the attack happened on Mother’s Day, adding insult to the injury of being “nearly murdered.”
“If the fire department had been another 20 minutes, I’d have burned alive,” Jahzmine said. “I was up until 5 or 6 a.m. My body would not let me fall asleep after.”
A Medford spokesperson said a fire engine stretched one line and had the fire knocked down in less than five minutes. Camp residents said authorities canvassed and assessed the crime scene for a few additional hours after the fire was put out.
Investigating the incident
It was lucky there was rain a couple of days before the fire. If the site had been dry, it could have been a “totally different story,” one Wellington camper said.
Four years ago, an unhoused man camping nearby was found dead inside his burned tent. The cause of the fire was put under investigation by four agencies but did not appear suspicious at the time, according to the state’s Department of Fire Services. Investigators found “cooking appliances and what appeared to be electrical power, possibly from a generator, as potential ignition sources” and no evidence a fire had been set intentionally, Executive Office of Public Safety and Security public information officer Jake Wark said.
State authorities are leading an inquiry into the May 10 fire, a Medford spokesperson said, and the campers are grateful. “Luckily, [the police] took our side,” Skyfall said.
Transit Police officers visited the campsite May 14, though, warning it would be cleared by authorities at some point – which could have been manageable for most of the campers if the sweep came when Y2Y reopened. But police returned May 15 with a rough two-week deadline to leave the site with their belongings or be charged with criminal trespass. That demand, since hardened to Friday, creates a two-week gap.
All say they do not know where they will go if they are forced to leave the Medford patch.
“We don’t have another place to take our camp,” Jahzmine said. “We don’t.”
A version of this story was produced for Binj.news, the independent weekly magazine published by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, and was syndicated by Binj’s MassWire news service.
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