The last thousand people who live on Houston's streets are the hardest to help. Franccessa Osho shows why

By Hunter Atkins

In June, just outside Minute Maid Park, Oluwabusayo Franccessca Osho lived in a tent.

In June, just outside Minute Maid Park, Oluwabusayo Franccessca...

Inside her tent, she looked into a mirror and saw a superstar. She turned her face, pursed her lips and narrowed her stare. Oluwabusayo Franccessa Osho shimmied with delight.

Outside, at the corner of Preston and Hamilton, across from Minute Maid Park, thousands of baseball fans glanced at the gray tent. Then they kept walking.

Most never saw the small, lithe woman with Bantu knots and onyx skin.

Osho immigrated to the United States from Nigeria, leaving behind a stable family. In Nigeria, she had earned a college degree in international studies, and in Maryland, she studied nursing. But she also had visions of becoming a supermodel posing for magazines, promoting global brands and entertaining television audiences.

Instead, she wound up in Houston, homeless for the better part of two years. In recent months, as the city implemented ordinances that banned panhandling and prohibited tents like hers, she repeatedly declined offers from outreach groups that hoped to help her off the streets.

Houston has nearly 60 percent fewer homeless people than it did five years ago, thanks to an expansion of emergency housing. But the estimated 1,000 who remain on the city's streets are the most difficult to help.

There in her tent, Osho kept a modeling career on her mind and a roll of toilet paper atop a Bible. She embodied the problem the city faces: What to do with someone who needs assistance but refuses to accept it?

She was fed up with outreach services. Basic housing was not enough. She wanted the glamorous life that she had envisioned when she came to this country.

"I don't have to give up on my dreams," Osho said.

They were bound up in a man she referred to as her fianc, Jonathan. She said she did not need help because Jonathan would be getting them a place soon.

"He will take care of me."

Thousands of Astros fans have walked past Osho's tent.

Thousands of Astros fans have walked past Osho's tent.

'Always watches me'

From the other side of Preston, a crosswalk camera shaped like a pupil kept an eye on Osho's tent. The heightened security around the ballpark was one of the reasons she had settled by Minute Maid Park in December.

She did not care for baseball, but the fanfare could raise her spirits.

"It's nice," she said. "It's good to win something."

Once the season started in April, ballgame crowds trundled past her. Sometimes drivers, pedestrians and ballpark security guards gave her things.

She was comfortable in her tent. Her tiny world. Everything within reach. A blanket patterned with peace symbols. Mountain Dew. Ramen. A pink backpack of clothes, including slim dresses.

She rigged a mirror over a small foldout chair like a makeshift vanity and filled soda bottles with lotion. She used baby wipes to stay clean.

Cutouts of natural landscapes and hair models decorated the tent walls. "I look at a beautiful model because I want to be the face of something," she said.

When feeling trustful, Osho showed her bright intellect and spirit. She cackled, giggled and squeaked like a dolphin at play. Court records list her as 5 feet tall, 90 pounds and 29 years old.

She said she is 31, but she looked half that age. Often she acted like a teenager, too. She said she wanted a phone because "I just want to update my profile picture."

Later, after she got a phone, she kept the mesh tent flap zipped shut and her earbuds in. She listened to Ariana Grande songs about love.

Those songs reminded her of Jonathan. She said he texted her, checked on her, sent her money and promoted her modeling portfolio.

He was romantic, she said. She reached into her backpack for a red candy apple. In her reedy fingers, it looked the size of a grapefruit. Jonathan gave it to her, she said, because it symbolized her beauty.

She made him gifts, too. She filled a heart-shaped notepad with love notes. She designed tank tops with messages for him, breaking apart bracelets, removing the stitches from clothes and cutting out letters from a fuzzy scarf to get the materials. She set aside one special tank top to wear for him on June 20, her birthday.

Jonathan had multiple jobs, she explained. He was a musician. He also worked surveillance for the police.

If she wanted something from Jonathan, she stared into the camera across the street and shouted for it. "Jonathan, he always watches me on camera," she said.

Why would Jonathan let her sleep on a sidewalk?

Osho said he was saving up to buy them an apartment.

"Just a young couple trying to make it," she said.

Using scrap materials, Osho made a special tank top to celebrate her birthday.

Using scrap materials, Osho made a special tank top to celebrate...

"No one can stop me"

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"I came from a good home," Osho said.

She grew up with two sisters in a dusty, motorbike-buzzing city in Osun State, more than three hours north of Lagos. Her parents divorced when she was 9, and she gravitated toward her father, Chief Samson, who works for the postal service.

She fell in love with American entertainment. She watched "E! News," "The Ellen Degeneres Show" and anything with models. She listened to Top 40 country.

She said she applied for a visa in 2008 and won the green-card lottery in 2011. Her father had relatives who lived in Waldorf, Md., so he paid for Osho's plane ticket there. He supported her goals, however lofty, with the expectation that she would earn a nursing degree at the College of Southern Maryland.

"Nigeria isn't really enough for me to show the world the talent that I have," she said. "In America, they won't take you for granted."

Waldorf is not exactly Hollywood: Her first job was at Taco Bell.

It was no place for a supermodel, and her manager recognized that. She lasted six weeks.

On campus, she glided around in elaborate outfits. Wigs and weaves of all colors and styles. Glistening eye shadow lacquered on and accentuated by eyeliner wings. Butterfly earrings larger than her hands. Furs.

On her birthdays, she wore a tiara and pearls with pink clothes to match the icing on cookie cakes that she bought for herself. In a photo, she posed with a cake and made a look of surprise.

"I practically was her only friend," said Raquel Ortiz.

After Osho's first semester, her focus on academics waned, but her dreams of modeling remained.

"She wanted me to take pictures of her everywhere," Ortiz said.

In 2014, Osho parted with the school and broke off from her relatives. She moved into a shelter.

After a year there, she said, she wanted a change of scenery. "I just decided that no matter how, even if I didn't have money, to come to Texas," Osho said. "No one can stop me."

Perhaps not coincidentally, in August 2015, Maryland police had a warrant out for her arrest on trespassing charges.

Supporters at a church bought her a Greyhound ticket. After two days on the bus, Osho exited at Houston's Main Street.

She did not have a plan. But she did know one thing about the city.

On Tuesday nights in Maryland, she had watched Houston's Lakewood Church on TV. The megachurch's sermons and choir reminded her of the services in Nigeria.

In September, after a month in Houston, Osho asked a good Samaritan to take her to a Sunday service at Lakewood. There, she spotted Jonathan in the front row. She was four rows back. He turned, she said, and looked her way.

She attended Sunday services for a few more weeks, moving one row closer and then another. Jonathan made eye contact with her, she said.

Later, anyone who got to know Osho would hear her speak about Jonathan, the fianc she said watched out for her. But she almost never mentioned his full name: Jonathan Osteen.

As in, the son of Lakewood's multi-millionaire televangelist pastor Joel Osteen.

Jonathan Osteen, the recent University of Texas grad. Jonathan Osteen, the teen heartthrob who leads Lakewood Church's band.

Inside the tent.

Inside the tent.

'Glimmer of lucidity'

The events that landed Osho in a tent by the ballpark in December 2016 included a brief stay with the good Samaritan, a longer stretch at the Star of Hope shelter for women, two attacks by homeless men and two misdemeanors for trespassing, one of which led to 38 days in Harris County Jail.

She liked jail. She got to shower there.

"I always think that jail is horrible, disgusting, scary, but when I get to jail, I'm like, oh my God, so much better than sleeping outside," she said. "They even have TV!"

She addressed her violent encounters with more gravity. She said she was throttled while sleeping by the Theater Center and left bleeding from a punch to the forehead. In another tussle, a drunk at a bus stop split open her lip, leaving a scar on her gums.

She said she fought off both men rabidly. She aimed for their eyes and genitals.

Trauma and homelessness go together, experts say. Each can cause the other.Chronic homelessness tends to hardwire effects of the trauma.

When Osho checked into the Star of Hope, no one expected her to change overnight. The shelter recommends committing 18 months to its long-term facility for rehabilitation and job placement.

"It's not easy to restore mental stability when you're living on the streets," said Eva Thibaudeau, the director of programs at Coalition for the Homeless.

But Osho chafed at Star of Hope. She complained about the food. She hated the mats she was given for sleeping on the crowded shelter's floor. She left after six weeks.

She considered the chance to live freely worth braving the risks under U.S. 59. She did not feel vulnerable, she said: Jonathan looked after her. He was a protector and provider. She said he gave her the tent.

For months after Osho cozied up on the corner, various homeless organizations and the Houston Police Department's Homeless Outreach Team talked with her consistently. They were hoping for a "glimmer of lucidity," Thibaudeau said - a moment when Osho might be persuaded to leave the streets.

Jonathan complicated that. Osho refused services because, she said, she had him.

"She has these moments of great lucidity," said Sgt. Steve Wick, who works on the Homeless Outreach Team. "But then whenever it gets to really progressing with her, it gets difficult."

The police Homeless Outreach Team had "dozens" of engagements with Osho, Wick said. Kenneth Eakins, a Star of Hope case manager, estimated he met with her 65 times, sometimes four or five times in one day.

"It's like, 'Where's Jonathan?'" Eakins said, with his palms raised.

"He is real," Osho said.

But a call to Lakewood Church confirmed what outreach workers had long suspected.

Jonathan Osteen has never met Osho, said Andre Davis, a church spokesperson. Jonathan Osteen does not recall seeing Osho at services and does not know anything about her.

In May, Osho bought a cell phone.

In May, Osho bought a cell phone.

Facebook fantasies

From 6,500 miles away, Osho's family kept track of her through Facebook.

She posted images of wedding outfits and babies. By 2016, she showed off a fianc to complete the picture. She put up his music videos. She called him the "love of my life."

Her Facebook world went dormant in October 2016, a couple of months before she began living in her tent outside Minute Maid Park.

"I don't want to be telling my parents that I'm homeless," Osho said. "When I get back on my feet, and I have a house, they will see my beautiful house on Skype."

She could not bear explaining the truth. She slept in a tent that leaked during frequent storms and baked in the Texas heat. She urinated in Tupperware and defecated in shopping bags. When motivated to get up, she disposed of her waste in a trash can. Other times she just reached out and flung it into a sewer drain.

Her father thought she was engaged to be married.

"Initially she was with my cousin," he said over the phone, "but she left to be on her own."

According to Osho's younger sister, Victoria, Osho did not choose to leave their relative's house in Maryland, but he kicked her out at his wife's behest.

Regardless of what made Osho homeless, her family in Nigeria could not find a way to help, and they stopped trying when she said she rebounded in Houston. They were oblivious to her destitution.

"She's totally in sound mind while in Nigeria," said Victoria, when informed of her sister's whereabouts. "I guess (the) constant disappointment made her lose it."

After a stint in housing, Osho has returned to the same spot outside Minute Maid. But she's discarded her tent and sleeps unsheltered now.

After a stint in housing, Osho has returned to the same spot...

Not hopeless

Read more from the original source:
The woman who sleeps across from Minute Maid Park - Houston Chronicle