PORTLAND, Ore. — Through the rows of tents and sleeping bodies scattered throughout parts of downtown Portland, Shannon Starr searches for her daughter, Jade Wilder. She calls out her street name, “Pax,” amid a cluster of tents near Old Town and gets no response. It could mean that Wilder isn't here, but silence is often how she replies when she doesn’t want to be found.
For the past two months, Starr has spent every day walking the streets, trying to save her daughter who is homeless and addicted to drugs. Last week, KGW reporter Blair Best found Jade by chance while reporting on a story downtown. Jade moved from a small town in Arizona to Portland four years ago. She had her own apartment and was a manager at her job, but that quickly changed.
“She was living downtown, basically Tent City, and she started to befriend some of the people downtown ... and I guess someone gave her her first blue pill,” Starr said, referring to the ubiquitous pale blue "M-30" fentanyl pills.
“My body just gave out on me and then I started using drugs,” Wilder explained when the KGW crew first met her a week ago.
Her mother started making the trip from Arizona to Portland to try and help her. She eventually took a leave of absence from work to search for her full-time, but that time off ends this week.
“I’ve run out of money,” Starr said. “I ran out of money weeks ago, so I just come out here — I try to give her water, I try to convince her even to just get medical care.”
Growing up, Starr said that Wilder never used drugs, so she was surprised when she learned of her addiction.
“Portland sucked the life out of her, it really just ate her up. I'm just hoping it's not going to spit her out,” Starr said.
Through all of this, Starr has come to learn the streets almost as well as those who live on them. Wilder’s homeless friends know her by name and hug her when they see her.
“That’s one way I try to find her is networking,” Starr said. It’s one of the only things she can do, since legally she’s not allowed to force her daughter into treatment or take her without consent.
“It just seems like there’s roadblock after roadblock, that there’s nothing I can do because of her age. And hopefully she lives to see her 29th birthday at the end of this month,” Starr said. It’s a painful reality she’s learning to live with through counseling and group therapy. “I don’t want my daughter to die. I’m supposed to die first. She’s supposed to go to my funeral. I’m staring at bodies on the street like, 'Is that mine, is that person dead, is that person alive? When I do find her, I’ll sit there for hours with her.”
She checked the corner of Southwest 4th and Harvey Milk; a place Wilder often camps. Starr spotted a woman curled up in the middle of the sidewalk, thinking it was her daughter.
“Could this by my sweetheart?” she said while kneeling to wake her up. Despite a similar haircut and build, it wasn’t her daughter.
“It’s like this emotional up and down every day,” Starr said of the toll this takes on her. She gave the homeless woman the rest of her iced chai tea latte and kept walking; hoping to find her daughter before it’s too late.
“We’re told by other people to turn our backs, to let them hit rock bottom — but this is rock bottom. I don’t see how street life is any sort of life at all,” Starr said.