Homeless in RI: Death at Echo Village and Rob’s Long Journey Home – Bernie Beaudreau

By Bernie Beaudreau, contributing writer

I met Rob and his brother Mike last July. They were homeless together, taking care of each other. Rob was not in great physical health, with an ailing heart condition, and Mike with health challenges of his own. After losing their Oakland Beach apartment, they spent some of Mike’s disability check on a tent and camping gear and moved to an encampment off Hospital Street in Providence, next to their half-brother and sister-in-law who had been camped there since mid-April. Rob told me they avoided shelters because of trauma they experienced many years ago.

During the heat waves of last summer, Rob and Mike would lie on a blanket on the sidewalk in the shade of the highway bridge. They couldn’t stay in their tent as the sun turned it into an oven. We delivered cases of drinking water on some of the hottest days.

The Hospital Street encampment was off Point Street, a grassy triangle patch of highway land on the embankment of 195 and out of view of the highway traffic. It’s a well-hidden spot for a homeless encampment, isolated and far from any neighborhood. It didn’t last for long.

In mid-August the city had issued a vacate order to the site and by mid-September most of the seven homeless people encamped there had left in search of another place out of public view.

Working with Better Lives Rhode Island, we were able to assist Rob’s half-brother and his wife secure shelter units at Echo Village. Rob and Mike found short term refuge sleeping on the floor of a friend’s house. Then Rob called me on October 1 and told me they were on the street again, in sleeping bags under a bridge at the Water Fire circle as the October nights got colder.

I called several of the shelters, looking for beds for the brothers and was told repeatedly that there were “no beds available”, even though the Executive Office of Housing’s recent shelter data dashboard suggested that there were plenty of unused shelter beds in the system.

A week later Rob called and said they found another encampment site off Post Road in Warwick. I visited once and brought them some cold medicine. Rob and Mike had heard good things about Echo Village from their half-brother and wanted to move there. Again, with the help of Better Lives RI, by late October they landed two shelter units at Echo Village. They and their two other family members were very happy there in their new transitional home.

The big snow storm of January 25 left over a foot of snow, collapsing many tents of homeless folks encamped throughout the state. Some ended up sleeping in cars. Others went to the pop-up temporary shelters funded by the state. Several tragically perished in the deep cold. But Echo Village stood strong, just a lot of snow to shovel to open the walkways.

Rob was not the type of guy to let others do all the work so he picked up a shovel to do his part to clear his area after the storm. His heart couldn’t take it. The next morning Mike found him still, lying on the floor of his unit. Sadly, at 49 years of age, Mike’s caring brother, Rob, had passed away.

Reflecting on his passing, a social worker who knew him well shared with me, “It is so sad. I’m glad he died in community and not solo somewhere.” Rob had made Echo Village his home.

Providing a sense of community is an important feature of the Echo Village shelter model. There are forty-five individual pallet shelters, each providing individual privacy, a real bed, some storage, security and easy access to sanitary facilities, delivering heat in the winter and cooling in the summer, with daily services of hot meals, individual counseling and support.

Rob is, sadly, gone after many months of bearing the hardships of homelessness. There is some comfort in knowing that he was able to spend his last few months living in a place of dignity, where he found care, company and rest in a place he could call his home.

This is Rob outside his tent off Post Road, October 2026

After the city’s September clearing of the site, several homeless individuals gradually moved back. In early January the police issued another copy of the September vacate notice to the homeless campers. And on Wednesday, January 14, the City of Providence sent in a backhoe and dump trucks and removed all remaining tents and any other remnants of the small homeless community.

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Bernie Beaudreau, Community Volunteer

Rumford, RI