Plenty International

87-year-old won't see home finished

By Jarvis DeBerry

It's not hard to figure out the kind of man Vernon Washington Sr. was. He was 87 years old and, along with a volunteer group from Tennessee, was helping rebuild 1209 Charbonnet St. in the Lower 9th Ward.

The Charbonnet house didn't belong to Washington but to his deceased brother. Even so, the old man meant to live there. His own house, over on North Johnson Street, had been destroyed, like thousands of other ones, on Aug. 29, 2005. He had had to hack a hole in the roof to escape the rising water. He had had to wait -- three days, his son says -- for help to arrive. And then he had been evacuated to a hospital where he was treated for dehydration.

But Washington -- who had worked as a longshoreman, an iceman, a floor finisher and in other construction trades -- came back to New Orleans. He lived in one FEMA trailer and then another. And then it came time to take the FEMA trailers away.

Vernon Washington with Plenty's Elaine Langley and Tony Sterlazza in from of his home last September.

Tony Sferlazza, a carpenter with the volunteer group Plenty International, said after FEMA employees came and took Washington's FEMA trailer away, the agency set him up in a hotel room in the city. And, Sferlazza said, that's where Washington spent Wednesday night, Dec. 5.

Plenty International helps build houses at cost, Sflerlazza said. All the labor is donated. The house was almost done, he said. They needed the city's inspectors to come out and examine their work before the utilities could be turned on.

As for Washington checking into the hotel, there was a momentary hitch that had something to do with whether he had a FEMA identification number. But that had been resolved, Sferlazza said. Washington spent Wednesday night in the hotel, and Sferlazza assumed he'd also spend Thursday night there.

But when Sferlazza arrived at the house on Charbonnet Street Friday, Dec. 7, he realized that Washington had made the fatal decision to spend Thursday night there.

Sferlazza said he found Washington's body on "a bare mattress. No blanket. No pillow. He was cold."

"The inspectors came while I was waiting for the coroner," Sflerlazza said. That means, he said, that the house could have been powered up as soon as Monday or Tuesday.

Local FEMA spokesman Bob Josephson said Friday that Washington was the last person to leave the group trailer site the agency established on St. Claude Avenue. He was offered a hotel room, Josephson said, but Washington said he was really close to finishing his house and could go there.

Washington's family didn't know he'd decided to sleep in the cold house. They didn't even know he was no longer in the FEMA trailer, his son Vernon Washington Jr. said. "I didn't find that out until after it happened," he said.

The younger Washington, who lives in California, said he had talked to his father a few days earlier about the progress being made on the house on Charbonnet Street. "At that point he told me they only had a couple more days" of work to do, he said.

"He was extremely hard-working," the son said of his father, "and he believed in getting things done right, without any shortcuts."

That Vernon Washington Sr. was a hard worker goes without saying, considering that he was 87 and putting all his energy into rebuilding a home in the neighborhood he loved. Even so, Sferlazza said that during one of his last conversations with Washington, the old man thanked him for all the help he and his group had provided.

"He said, 'Son, when this job is over I'm gonna hang up my tools.' "

Somebody else will have to hang them up for him. Vernon Washington Sr. died before he could finish.

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