Film Tells Wrenching Tale of Homeless Nashvillian

Bipolar woman was pushed into river

(October 05, 2007) -- The story of Tara Cole, the woman who was thrown into the Cumberland River and drowned last August, has haunted Nashvillians for more than a year now.

Tara Cole was thrown into the Cumberland River and drowned in August 2006.

First there were nightly vigils for Cole, 32, who had bipolar disorder and had been living on the city's streets when two young men assailed her as she slept on a boat ramp near Riverfront Park.

Then, last December, the American Negro Playwright Theatre staged Shelter, a play about a homeless person who is victimized in the much same way.

Now, tonight, the film Angel Unaware: The Tara Cole Story will have its premiere at the Belcourt Theatre as part of the International Black Film Festival of Nashville.

"As you walk the riverfront, you see her face in the water," said Clemmie Greenlee, an outreach organizer with the Nashville Homeless Power Project who knew Cole. "Her face is all over that water."

Cathie Buckner, a Power Project leadership team member who, like Greenlee, has been homeless, said that a big reason that Cole's story has struck a chord with so many is that "it was obvious that she was mentally ill.

Stepmother Carole Boyd and father Darryl Boyd grieve for their daughter Tara Cole at a service at St. Anne's Episcopal Church in September 2006. Two men threw Cole into the river. (JOHN PARTIPILO/ FILE / THE TENNESSEAN)

"Anybody who knew her knew that some days she was OK, and some days she wasn't. She always wore a wool cap and a wool coat. It didn't matter what time of year it was. She didn't carry bags like a lot of homeless people. She wore everything she owned on her back."

Nashvillian Leo Hall, the director of Angel Unaware, made the film with the cooperation of Cole's parents in part to raise awareness about the intimate, and too often fatal, connection between homelessness and mental illness.

"Something that Tara's father said really stuck with me," Hall said. "He said, 'Who in their right mind would sleep near a river?'

"When Tara took her medicine she was fine," Hall went on to say. "But the trend was — take her meds, feel fine, stop taking them.

"Back during the Reagan administration, laws were changed so that no one could be institutionalized against their free will. A lot of people in mental hospitals had to be released, even if they didn't have anywhere to go. A lot of them ended up on the streets. Tara was 25 and bipolar and fully emancipated when she became homeless. No one could force her to take her medicine."

Stereotypes and hate

Hall's movie, which spans Cole's entire life, from her early years singing in church in Elgin, Ill., to her final days on the streets of Nashville, is a crucial reminder of the threat of violence under which so many homeless people live. The National Coalition for the Homeless reports that most violent acts against people on the streets are committed not by organized hate groups but by individuals who harbor a resentment against them.

It happens in Nashville with alarming regularity, Greenlee said.

"We had a homeless man sexually abused in a park and another get cut up, where he received 52 stitches ... . Then there was the Fourth of July incident. Two teenage boys beat up this homeless man real bad because he didn't have any money to give them. They broke his hip."

Rhonda Richey, a homeless friend of Tara Cole, cries as she says some words about the homeless woman who was thrown into the river. The Homeless Power Project held a vigil for Cole in August 2006 at Riverfront Park. (BILLY KINGSLEY / THE TENNESSEAN)

Buckner cites video games that present homeless people as targets, along with "bum fighting," a gladiator-type of combat between homeless people who are paid to participate, as a big reason for the prevalence of the violence.

"It's OK for our youth to use homeless people as somebody to victimize because they do it in video games," she said. "If they did bum fighting with little puppies, the ASPCA (American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) would be jumping up and down and screaming about it. There's no advocate like that for homeless people."

Steven Samra, a provider of services to homeless Nashvillians who are mentally ill, agrees.

"Our culture has stereotyped the homeless as a subhuman group," he said. "Anytime you label or create that separation from humanity, that separation from me and you, it makes it easier to attack, denigrate, beat, marginalize, ignore. And youth are particularly susceptible to that because they suffer so much from peer influence. It really is that peer influence, especially in males, that perpetuates a violent streak."

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Hall considers it a moral sickness.

"Tara was sick in one way, and those two young men were sick in another, evil way," he said. "I don't know what they had in mind when they did that to her, but the way I look at it, not only did they ruin the Coles' lives, it ruined their lives. How do you go to sleep doing something like that?"

By Bill l Friskics-Warren

Source: Tennessean,com

Last updated: 10/070

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