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The night before he died, Mario Acosta cooked fajitas with strips of steak too large to fit on a tortilla. He doused the meat in hot sauce he picked up from some anonymous taqueria near his workplace. And then apparently, he hoisted the steak up on a big fork and chomped down joyously.
When the hot sauce kicked in, he said to his housemates: “Look, I’m crying.”
To hear his friends tell it, that’s the only time you’d be likely to see Mario Acosta crying. They call him a “true free spirit,” a man who loved to build elaborate dreamcatchers, like the one at the top this page.
Standing among his dreamcatchers on their front porch, Lauren O’Steen and her daughter Allyson told me the fajita story to sort of define the experiences they shared in their home with Mario. They found it absolutely hilarious: his Mexican accent, his silly look, his whacky hair, his peculiar take on fajitas — all of it. But a stranger to them and to Mario — like me — will never really quite get what made it so funny.
Born in Mexico and well-traveled, Mario Acosta had been homeless at times in his life, including his life in Polk County. He had lived under the Polk Parkway overpass on Bartow Highway; and in “the blue house,” a known squatters’ house somewhere around the Lakeland Center. At one point, he lived in the very troubled house three doors away from me. That’s how I “met” him. I saw him walk back and forth daily in a trench coat and hat to that place. That place has a bad reputation within Mario’s community, I have since learned, and he wanted to get out. I never spoke a word to him. Lauren O’Steen and her boyfriend Mike took him in.
So Mario Acosta was emphatically not homeless on the night he was killed. He was happy, the happiest he had been in his life, he told Lauren. In fact, defending his home and happiness got him killed.
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We often talk about the “homeless” or “transient” problems in Lakeland, specifically in the downtown and Lake Morton areas. But we’re not very good at defining it. Real problems do exist. Some wayward men harass and intimidate some people and each other. Some men make public spaces less pleasant than they ought to be for everyone. Men at the laundromat periodically harass and intimidate pedestrians, particularly young women. By most accounts, there has been an uptick in confrontational behavior perpetrated by newly arrived drifters from outside of our city.
But it’s important to note that a homeless man at the laundromat, who knew Matthew Bell, recognized him as the man accused of killing Mario Acosta. This homeless man risked his life to call the police from the laundromat/convenience store complex. He caught Matthew Bell and solved the problem he posed. I confirmed that last week from a couple of sources.
To my knowledge, Mario Acosta never harassed or panhandled anyone. He certainly never caused me any distress. Yet, I casually associated him with the broad “problem” of homelessness, just by his appearance and the associations I could see. I wasn’t going to do anything about it. I didn’t fear or despise him. I didn’t want the police to dog him. I just logged it away as an observation. I located him in my mind as an artifact of a “problem” my country has very little interest in solving.
After all, I could have taken in Mario Acosta at any time. It never even crossed my mind.
So let’s recognize what Lauren O’Steen did both for Mario and for our neighborhood. Along with Mario himself, who worked two jobs, Lauren and her family solved Mario Acosta’s role in this nebulous “homeless problem.” Anyone who considers the “homeless” or “transient” community a “problem” for my neighborhood owes them a debt of gratitude.
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I set this up to describe how I came to hang out with Lauren and Allyson and Mike and Pete Latoski, the other person Matthew Bell is accused of stabbing.
If you remember, in a fit of pique at LPD’s silence on the Saturday morning after Mario’s stabbing, I marched down to 720 Johnson Avenue.
I wrote this last week:
So I walked back down to 720 Johnson Avenue with my phone. It’s like 300 yards from my house. When I got there, a woman in a wheelchair was crying on the phone breaking the news of someone’s death. “I just didn’t want you to hear it on the street,” I heard her say.
Someone who looked like a teenager or young woman was standing next to her. I mouthed, “Is this the house?” The person nodded. I pointed at the blood stain. “Is that blood?” I mouthed again. The person nodded again.
I heard the crying woman say that that a detective had told her at 2:30 a.m. that the person police were tracking had run through the library complex toward Bartow Highway. He was thought to have tried to hitchhike to his mothers house in Lake Wales.
I took a picture of the house and the blood and went right back home. It was not my warmest moment as a human being. I’m not especially proud of it.
Well, that chicken roosted, as well it should have, early last week. The woman in the wheelchair was Lauren O’Steen. The younger woman was her daughter Allyson, who just graduated from high school and works at Mr. Fish.
They sort of jointly Facebooked me. They were quite polite, really, all things considered. But they were unhappy with what I wrote about them, about Mario, and, I think, especially, my presumptive arrogance in barging into their grief with a cameraphone and then never saying another word to them.
What was I gonna say in response? They were right. Completely. I told them if I were them, I’d be mad at me, too. And I asked for the chance to come talk to them and learn about Mario. The very graciously welcomed me to their porch on Wednesday evening. That’s where I met Pete Latoski, who showed me his stab wound and let me photograph it.
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The knife just missed his lungs. Because Pete essentially lives on the street, he said no one will prescribe him painkillers, not even high strength ibuprofen. I don’t say that with judgment either way; it’s just a reminder of the different worlds different people inhabit. Pete, who hails from Detroit, also told me with great pride about his daughter who just graduated from the University of Michigan, a hell of a good school. And we talked a little about Jim Harbaugh.
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720 Johnson is not a “rooming house,” as The Ledger termed it. It’s Lauren’s house. Period. Over the last few years, through circumstances and choice, Lauren has come to know many of the men I referred to as living on “the fringes of society,” a phrase she objected to.
She has taken in two of them, as I understand it: Mario Acosta and Matthew Bell.
Bell is the man accused of killing Mario. He lived in Lauren’s house before Mario, although I’m not certain about the dates. And I’m not exactly sure how he came to live there. I didn’t press Lauren on the specifics. But he was a troubled person and a source of household tension. Lauren and the others eventually asked him to leave. Again, I’m not exactly sure of the dates.
Lauren said she had no plans to take anyone else in, precisely because of the problems with Bell. But then her boyfriend Mike became friendly with Mario, who was working a late shift at the convenience store that teams up with the laundromat to serve as a breeding ground of trouble in our neighborhood.
Mario wanted to leave the house near me that I mentioned before. Lauren’s home and family gave him the chance. That arrangement worked out beautifully until last Friday night, when Bell came by and apparently started a verbal confrontation with Latoski.
I asked Lauren why she didn’t call the police rather than asking Pete and Mario to deal with Bell.
“You think I don’t kick myself about that every day?” she answered. Understanding that she knew Bell provides a little more context. I’m sure she never thought he would kill Mario.
————
I’m not here to glorify or infantilize or check with reporterish scrutiny the records and backgrounds of everyone who attended Mario’s memorial service Saturday evening in a steady downpour. It was a nice crowd. I was happy to see it. Julie and I had to leave early for a previous engagement; so we didn’t get to hear what everyone said about Mario.
And I’m not going to pretend that just because I’ve spent a couple hours at 720 Johnson that I’m somehow a member of Mario’s circle. I’m not. But I know more than I did.
When not mourning, I know Lauren and Mike and their friends like to sit and drink beer and eat and talk on their porch. So do Mario. So do I. Few things in the world I enjoy more. I hope we can do it together some time soon.
And I know that Lauren and Mike and Allyson loved Mario. You can feel it when they talk about him. You could feel it when the defended his memory against what they perceived as an attack from me. He seems to have been a person well deserving of their love. There are worse epitaphs.
Not long before he died, Lauren told me Mario tried to explain his happiness to her.
“From my mouth to my mind to my heart, I’m proud of you,” Mario said.
I’m not a very sentimental person — and becoming less so as I get older. But what a lovely metaphor for civic pride. That’s how I feel about my neighborhood — and about my city. I want to fight for it with my mouth, my mind, and my heart.
But it’s hard to really fight for any community if you make no effort to know it. We should all remember that when people drone on about whatever-on-whatever crime or disorder. There’s no such thing. Every confrontation, like every neighbor, has a story all its own.
A horrible thing happened to Mario Acosta, my neighbor. I wish I could undo it. Absent that, I want to honor Mario by being a better neighbor. And I want to thank Lauren and Allyson for giving me a push in that direction.