Audrey Lumer dead at the 21st. St-Van Alst station on the G line
For four years, she had been evicted from her home. She was found dead and homeless in the subway.
She lived in Queens on Utopia Pkwy. She was homeless and alone when she died in the bowels of a Long Island City metro station.
She was found dead on the platform of the G line subway at the 21st. St-Van Alst station on Feb. 9. She was surrounded by bags and had bed bugs on her body. She had been kicked out of her apartment less than four years ago.
An amateur artist who kept cats and ran her own travel agency on Long Island until the business closed down, according to her family. She was also a cat lover.
The day Lumer was kicked out of her home on June 8, 2018, she was already in bad shape. She turned to living on the streets for 1,342 days. One of the six people found dead on the subway so far this year was her. She was the only one whose family has been told, the NYPD says.
Her brother, Steven Lumer, wrote a eulogy for her last week. "The police called me Wednesday and told me that Audrey had died," he said. People were shocked, but it was just a matter of time.
People in New York City are dealing with both homelessness and mental health issues now that New York State's eviction moratorium ended last month. Her death shows how the city is dealing with both issues at once.
As a child, Lumer lived on Utopia Pkwy., where she grew up, just a block from Francis Lewis High School, which she went to. In 2013, she moved back in with her father.
In that year, her house on Long Island had been foreclosed on. She moved in with her father, Joseph. However, a few years later, he moved out of the apartment he'd lived in since 1962 and gave up the lease. He wanted to spend his golden years with his new girlfriend, so he moved out and gave up the lease.
But Lumer didn't move out or pay her father's rent, housing court records show, so she didn't get a job. Getting her out of her home took three years.
He let her stay because she said in a May 31, 2018 filing that her "wallet" had been stolen three weeks ago. It was taken from me.
Lumer was kicked out eight days later.
In a court filing three days after she was kicked out of the apartment, she said, "I don't have a place to live. I can't stay there."
"I didn't have any money," she said in more paperwork on June 22, when she filed it.
Putting everything in a U-Haul truck, she took the rest of her things and her cats to a storage unit. She got some money from the government and sometimes worked as a food delivery person, her family says.
Getting her a home wasn't enough.
He is a finance director who owns an apartment on the Upper East Side. She couldn't stay with him because he doesn't have a place to stay. He got a protective order against his sister last year because he said she was harassing him and his family.
The day before she was kicked out, Steven tried to help her. "I told her to come up with a plan. When she was in need of help from the city and religious centers, she didn't want to take it.
Steven says he got a call from the police two months after Lumer was evicted. They told him that his sister had cats that were crying in her storage unit. Cops asked him if they could open the unit and take the cats to a shelter, and he agreed. He agreed with me.
Lumer's mental health got worse over the next few years, her family said. Her father died in 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, which kept the family from coming together for a proper funeral service.
She would often post old photos on Facebook, which she did with laptops from electronic stores.
There were posts where she said her brother took the cats. Her father's girlfriend was also blamed for getting them out of the Utopia Pkwy. apartment.
There is a policy director at the Coalition for the Homeless who says that being homeless makes it hard for people to stay mentally healthy. When people don't have stable and affordable housing, their lives can quickly fall apart. There's a lot we don't know about each person we see on the subway and on the street.
It's not clear if Lumer ever lived in a homeless shelter or talked to people who help the poor.
It was the last time Lumer talked to her brother. She went to his building lobby and asked to see him last year, and he said no. The police didn't take her to get help because she wasn't a threat to herself or anyone else.
Shortly after, she was dead on the G train platform, less than a year after she died.
A lawyer at the Legal Aid Society says that Lumer's story shows how fragile life can be for many people in New York after they are evicted from their homes. And, she said, an eviction crisis could put a lot of people in the same situation.
Goldiner: "So many people are behind on their rent, and so many people live in apartments that don't have safety features." "What will we do for those people?"
People who live in New York City had 3,455 eviction warrants when the moratorium was put into place on March 20, 2020, because of a virus. Since then, there have been more than 78,000 new eviction filings, according to the study.
"A lot of people need help," said Steven, who buried his sister last week in Staten Island. She wanted to be a well-known artist. Then, you know what? "Maybe her story helps her."
Mayor Adams came up with a plan on Friday to put more homeless people in shelters and care facilities.
Steven said that it was a few weeks too late.
