Jerry—a U.S. Marine veteran and single father—recounts how he and his son landed in Denver with no housing, briefly stayed at Samaritan House, and eventually found stability, only for Jerry to later leave his job to live alongside unhoused neighbors in protest after witnessing police confiscate survival gear in winter. Now an organizer with Denver Homeless Out Loud, he frames homelessness less as individual failure and more as a policy choice: ordinances like the urban camping ban, curfews, and constant sweeps turn rest into a privilege and exhaustion into enforcement, which he calls “slow genocide.”
He doesn’t worship money—his own rent is covered via HUD-VASH—but he insists resources and respect, not criminalization, are what change trajectories. His story is equal parts biography and indictment: a veteran leveraging his credibility to demand policy that treats unhoused people as citizens with rights, not problems to be hidden.
