- April 19, 2024
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In the past year of being homeless, one of Natasha Taylor Bennasr's stopping points has been this bench on Pine Lakes Parkway, near Wynnfield Drive. Photos by Brian McMillan
Residents contacted the Observer office after seeing Natasha at the corner of Belle Terre and White View parkways.
On the left: Natasha's mug shot when she was processed at the Flagler County Inmate Facility. On the right: Natasha's most recent Facebook profile picture, a couple of years earlier.
This spring, a call came in to the Palm Coast Observer about a homeless woman on Pine Lakes Parkway. The new gas station at Wynnfield Drive had recently opened, and one of the wire benches nearby had apparently been adopted by an African-American homeless woman in her 40s.
Then more calls came in. People started emailing about her, asking who she was and why she was living there, and wasn’t there something that could be done? Wasn’t there some kind of government program or a shelter for her? What about the Baker Act?
I was also curious about another question: How did she become homeless in the first place?
I drove by Pine Lakes one day. It was very humid — the kind of day when the grass seems to radiate heat.
Sure enough, there was a woman who matched the description: African-American, in her 40s. She was surrounded by grocery bags and other survival gear, including an umbrella to provide some shade. I brought a cold bottle of water with me and offered it to her.
“No thanks,” she said calmly. “I have plenty.”
And indeed, she had four or five half-drunk bottles of water in a grocery bag next to her on the bench.
“I’m sorry if this is awkward,” I said. “But some people have called me about you. They’re wondering if you’re OK, and if there’s anything they can do to help you.”
She was puzzled. She had short-cropped black hair with hints of auburn and gray, and she appeared relaxed, her eyes thoughtful, her countenance dignified. “Help me how?” she asked.
“Well, it’s kind of unusual to be living out here on a bench,” I said, trying not to sound patronizing. “I mean, do you have somewhere to live?”
I asked her name, but she refused to tell me.
She said she had a house, but it had been taken away from her. She said she was waiting for an attorney from Miami to help her, but she didn’t have the money to pay for the legal aid.
I offered to help her contact the attorney. I offered to let her use my phone.
But nothing satisfied her. She was already waiting for help, she said, but it wasn’t available. Nothing to do about it yet, just waiting.
Something wasn’t making sense.
I asked her about her background. Where did she come from?
“I’m a Vietnam veteran,” she said. She looked at me in the eyes, very proud of her service.
“But how old are you?” I asked.
“How old do I look?”
“Not old enough to be a Vietnam veteran,” I said. “I’m 36, and you look like you’re somewhere around my age.”
She looked at me for a moment and then said, “How much do you know about Vietnam?”
“Not a lot,” I said. “I’ve read a few books about it.”
Later, she told me her mother had died, and her father had disappeared. I made a note to do some research and see if it was true. Maybe she still had family in the area who could help.
We sat quietly for a few minutes in silence, watching cars pass by. Flies buzzed around her. It smelled like feces.
“Well,” I started again. “There are people in this city who would like to help you somehow. We care about you. So hopefully we can find a way.”
She assured me she was fine.
I walked back to my car, carrying the unopened bottle of water with me, wondering if I should have left it with her anyway.
Who was this woman? And how did she become homeless? I was determined to find out, and my first step was to call the Sheriff’s Office to see if they had an record of her.
The house at 72 Rolling Sands Drive appeared to be vacant. It was surrounded by other neatly kept homes that are typical of Palm Coast, but this one had its windows boarded up, and the lot was overgrown, with grass shin high. At other times, the front yard had gotten so bad it looked like a forest, with bright green weeds scraping against the gutters of the house.
One afternoon just before Thanksgiving 2014, a deputy named Shane Meehan was sent to the home after someone called about a suspicious person lurking about the property.
Meehan found a path worn in the grass from the front of the house to the rear, where a screen enclosure was torn away near the pool. Someone had been in this house — recently. A squatter.
On the back lanai, a window was partially open. Sheehan called out to see if anyone was there.
Silence.
Inside, he found trash on the floors and counters and furniture, as well as canned goods and soda cans, some of which were empty. But also, he saw small piles of burned material, as if someone had made small fires to burn trash or possibly to cook the canned food.
Meehan walked through the rest of the home but didn’t find anyone.
In the driveway, he stopped to look at the green Toyota. No license plate.
Then saw a woman approaching. She was in her 40s, African-American, about 5-foot-7. She was wearing a backpack and carried groceries in a sack.
She opened the mailbox and took out some advertising circulars. This is what homeowners do: check the mail. Maybe she had some explanation for the state of the home.
Then she started tossing the ads on the ground.
The deputy asked who she was, and she identified herself as Natasha Taylor Bennasr. She said she lived at the home, which used to belong to her parents. She opened her backpack and produced an envelope with documents that showed she had a claim to the property.
Something didn’t seem quite right, and the deputy suspected that she was suffering from a mental illness. He asked, “Are you under the care of a doctor? Are you on any medications, or should you be on any medications?”
She said she was not diagnosed with anything, and she was not taking medications. The deputy gave her a business card, but she refused any further help or attention.
Considering she didn’t appear to be in danger, there wasn’t much else for the deputy to do. It appeared that the woman was able to provide food and shelter for herself. In fact, she seemed to be well educated.
A property appraiser search confirmed that it was actually her house. So why was she living in it like this — as though she were homeless?
Eleven years earlier, Carole and Herman Taylor moved from New York to retire in Palm Coast. They moved into the home at 72 Rolling Sands Drive and added a swimming pool to the property the next year, in 2006. They attended Mount Calvary Baptist Church and were very active, having moved here to reunite with some friends from New York.
Then Carole got cancer. She died on March 4, 2011.
Before her death, she told her husband not to let their daughter move in with him. Natasha was Carole and Herman’s daughter, and she had some mental health challenges — always had. As a child, she spent a lot of time alone, and as an adult she became a perpetual student, obtaining two master’s degrees but never able to hold down a job. She had sometimes come down to Palm Coast from Maryland for some help before going back up north for another job.
That’s how a family friend tells the story. I spoke with the friend, Alonzo Spearman, who is a trustee at the church, in August of this year.
Ultimately, after Carole died, Herman let Natasha move in with him, after all. Just as Carole had predicted, it wasn’t a good situation.
“He would wake up in the middle of the night, and she was standing over him, checking to see if he had died,” Spearman said. Once, she drove to California and then the car broke down, so he had to fly out there and rescue her.
Herman had some heart problems, and Natasha stressed him out. He decided to take a vacation. He was an accomplished man, a former Marine who was fluent in Russian and French. He had worked for Air France airlines after the military, and one day he asked Spearman if he wanted him to travel to France with him for an adventure. They planned to travel across Europe and visit the Holy Land.
But Spearman had to back out at the last minute, so Herman Taylor went by himself. He flew all night, leaving Natasha home alone. When he got to the airport in France, he walked off the plane, had a massive heart attack and died right there in the terminal.
“We tried to get his body back,” Spearman said. “But she was the oldest, and she said she didn’t want him back because of the way he left. She said, ‘Bury him over there.’”
Herman Taylor was buried in France. For the next three years, Spearman and others fought to bring him back. Ultimately, they were successful.
The body was then exhumed, and a memorial service was held for him at Mount Calvary.
“He was buried beside his wife,” Spearman said.
Natasha didn’t come to the service.
Jim Sabaka is a stout man with a booming voice and blond hair that almost reaches his shoulders. He lives at 74 Rolling Sands Drive with his wife and teenage son and knew Herman Taylor as a good neighbor; they would chat in the driveway every now and then.
Some time after Herman died, the grass started to get out of control, and the landscaping company knocked on Sabaka’s door to see if he knew if there was any plan for cutting the grass. No one had paid them for a couple of months. No one seemed to know anything about the house. Was it vacant?
Then Sabaka started seeing a woman dressed in all black walking away from the house in the mornings. She had a huge backpack and carried other bags with her, as well, as though hauling all her possessions wherever she went. She wore sunglasses, a jacket and a snow hat even on hot days, almost as if she were in disguise. She would be gone all day, and then walk by again at night, sometimes with bags of groceries.
“She was like a ghost,” Sabaka said to me when I stopped by one recent afternoon. “She would walk down the street and just disappear into the darkness.”
Sabaka saw her a few times at the Target shopping center, when Books-A-Million was still in business. She sat at a table in the coffee shop there and used the WiFi on her brand new MacBook. Where did she get it? Did she have money?
But then things got spookier.
“You go out and sit on the back porch, and you’re smoking a cigar, and you hear this awful noise,” he recalled. “Banging, and scraping. It sounded like someone was doing business, like there was a demolition there, or someone was stealing copper.”
The water was shut off. There was no power in the home. Rats and snakes started to appear near the fence, and the Sabakas had to set out traps to keep from being overrun.
The swimming pool started to stink. Over the fence, Sabaka could see that the water was turning black from neglect, and, considering it would be easy for any young child to walk up and fall into the pool, he decided to do something about it. He called the city of Palm Coast’s Code Enforcement Department to complain.
The city got involved and, over the next few years, worked extensively to help bring the house into compliance. According to spokeswoman Cindi Lane, the staff went above and beyond any typical response, even contacting Natasha’s brother in New York to keep him aware of the situation. He traveled back and forth to try to address the problem, but Natasha refused to cooperate, and he eventually signed away any interest he had in the house, making her the sole owner.
According to the city, between 2012 and 2015 there were 15 Code Enforcement cases against Natasha’s house, with 10 citations for overgrown grass and weeds. But in those three years, as the due process continued, nothing really improved, and that frustrated Sabaka.
After all, he had been cited by Code Enforcement for leaving his work truck in his driveway. And the city won’t put a stop to his neighbor’s hazardous pool?
“This government puts so much pressure on us as homeowners to maintain our houses, and yet I’m stuck,” he said. “Brand new home, and I’ve got a lady that’s got a cesspool behind me, weeds growing up everywhere, rats in my garbage, and it takes three years for them to maintain the codes. I hired an attorney to see if I could force the city to enforce the codes. They know she’s in blatant code violation, and it took for frickin’ ever.”
I spoke with City Manager Jim Landon about the case, and he sympathized with Sabaka. “The neighbors went years with conditions next door to them that none of us would want to have to tolerate,” he said. And yet, what could the city do to convince Natasha to take care of the home, when she didn’t have the resources or wherewithal to do so?
Finally, in February 2015, the Code Enforcement Board voted to take an extreme measure — something that hadn’t yet happened in the city’s history: Foreclosure. This was not foreclosure out of failure to pay taxes or house payments (although those bills hadn’t been paid, either), but purely for violating the city’s codes.
As Sabaka sees it, that might seem cruel to Natasha, but it wasn’t fair or acceptable to let the situation continue, either.
“If I didn’t have to live by her, if the value of my home didn’t suffer, I might be more sympathetic,” he said. “But I was trapped.”
But tall weeds and a dirty pool weren’t the only the concerns. Sabaka said he was told by a law enforcement officer that Natasha had a concealed carry permit, and that Herman had left a gun collection in the house. Was this woman, who was walking around his home late at night, also carrying a gun?
Sabaka had his own permit, he said, and he started carrying his weapon because he didn’t feel safe without it. But that seemed like bad news all around. What if she confronted him sometime?
“If she goes short circuit, I don’t want to face her,” Sabaka said.
The city’s Code Enforcement officers were also aware of the threat of guns, so brought deputies with them whenever they needed to post notice or try to contact Natasha.
She wasn’t happy about their visits: She posted threatening “no trespassing” signs on her door, laced with profanities.
Meanwhile, a Port Orange-based investment company called Real Estate Solutions bought Natasha’s house and mortgage on the courthouse steps for $25,000, sight unseen, to try to flip the property for a profit.
The Code Enforcement headache was officially out of the city’s hands, but that didn’t mean Natasha willingly was going to leave her home to make way for the new owner.
Deputies from the Sheriff’s Office arrived at 72 Rolling Sands on the afternoon of Sept. 17, 2015, to evict her. The home had gotten progressively worse inside since Meehan’s first visit two years earlier, and in a case report, the deputies said it was an unsafe place to live.
“The home had a strong burning smell, and it appeared that Natasha attempted to light the house on fire as she was still living inside it,” Deputy Trevor Jacob wrote in the report. “There were several burnt objects in the home that appeared to have been recently burned.”
Later, Sabaka told me that he didn’t suspect Natasha ever actually tried to light the house on fire itself, but that she was cooking inside and it made everything black and soot-covered.
“After Natasha exited the residence,” Jacob’s report continues, “I began speaking with her and she did not appear to be in the right state of mind as she was unable to carry a normal conversation without making sudden incoherent statements. Natasha was unable to understand that she was being evicted and belligerently made several attempts to get back into the residence.”
Jacob determined that Natasha was a threat to herself. And that was enough to take her away, based on the Baker Act, which is a law that allows for involuntary detention for the purpose of a mental evaluation, for the space of 72 hours.
Jacob wrote: “Natasha was placed in custody … and was transported to the Pine Grove Crisis Center in Daytona Beach without incident.”
Later, deputies referred to Natasha as being diagnosed as schizophrenic.
But apparently, Natasha returned to the house after her 72-hour evaluation, because after two weeks passed, the scene was repeated. An agent from the real estate company opened the garage door, and Natasha came running around from the back of the house and yelled at them to get off her property. Sabaka remembers the night well, as several law enforcement vehicles were on the scene, lights blazing.
Natasha continued yelling at the officers, saying they were “spreading diseases.” And why were the power lines under ground? she asked. They should be above ground. She was about to go to the grocery store, she said, but when she got back she wanted everyone trespassed from her property.
Once again, she was taken away, and Baker Acted.
Then the real demolition began. Five dumpsters were brought in, and the house was gutted. Natasha was homeless.
Today, the home at 72 Rolling Sands is owned by Charles and Barbara French. Barbara French held a puppy in her arms as she explained that, on the second night when they were in the house, the toilet backed up. The drain in the bathtub started bubbling up sewage, Charles French said. So they called the plumber in the middle of the night.
Finally, a worker found the problem. Outside, the white plastic cap that was on the city’s sewer line had been broken off. When it was ultimately cleaned and fixed, they found rags and shot gun shells in an elbow joint underground. “She must have put them down the hole,” Charles French said.
Today, Jim Sabaka has a “normal” neighbor. The Frenches’ yard is manicured with crown-of-thorn and bird-of-paradise plants in the front yard, surrounded by smooth stones. Someone comes once a week to mow the lawn. Another person comes once a week to take care of the swimming pool.
Today, Deputy Shane Meehan still sees Natasha Taylor Bennasr around town. She has moved from the bench at Pine Lakes Parkway, then to White View and Belle Terre, and then she disappeared for a while before showing back up near McDonald’s and the Flagler County Public Library. I saw her on Aug. 30 as the rain started falling, on a bench in front of AutoZone. No umbrella.
“It’s a sad situation,” Meehan said. “What do you do when she doesn’t want help, but she’s definitely not living like you or I live? We don’t see people living that like.”
Although I had mostly satisfied my curiosity about how Natasha came to be in her current condition, I didn’t feel like I was any closer to answering the questions of some of the residents who had seen her: What can be done to help her?
I happened to stop by to see her on Whiteview Parkway one day in July at the same time others were there to talk to her: Two deputies had been asked to accompany a caseworker from the Department of Children and Families. A deputy told me DCF was looking at some options to help her.
Perfect! This could be a happy ending, after all.
I waited for the DCF worker to finish, hoping that he would have some results. It was, as usual, hot and humid outside. Insects swarmed around me, and I batted at them for about 10 minutes, until I saw her fill out a form and take some paperwork from him. The DCF worker left (he was unable to talk to me because of their confidentiality rules), and I sat down on the bench next to Natasha.
She was wearing a blouse with a floral design. She wore glasses and a canvas hat. Piled in front of her were several Walmart bags and a backpack and a pink handbag on a cart that looked like it was used for golf bags, donated by a woman who lived near the Pine Lakes course, she said.
I asked her if she had found any solutions through DCF. Was she going to get any help? Will she be able to find a place to live permanently?
“I’m working on that,” she said. “I have a timeshare I can convert into a permanent residence in Orlando. It’s at the Wyndham Resorts, I think.”
She again told me about her mother, saying she had died in 2011. Her father, she said, had disappeared later that year. I didn’t know at the time that he had actually died, and she never told me.
We talked for a few minutes, but she didn’t really respond to my questions: She talked about other things.
I left her there, unsure of what else to do. In, in fact, it seemed that the brutal truth was something most people didn’t want to hear: We could do nothing to help.
As I walked away, I glanced back and saw that she was fanning herself with the paperwork from DCF, the papers that, possibly, if she wanted it, could have given her access to some help. But, as she had told me, “I don’t need help.” Her eyes were bright and seemingly aware and thoughtful. She said, “I can take care of my own housing.”
