From rags to riches to rags: One man's spiral into homelessness

Alfred Postell totes his belongings in white plastic bags, haunts a downtown intersection and sometimes sleeps at a church. Photo / Washington Post photo by Terrence McCoy

The judge settled his gaze on the homeless man accused of sleeping beside an office building in downtown Washington.

It was a Saturday afternoon in April at DC Superior Court, and Alfred Postell, a diagnosed schizophrenic, stood before Judge Thomas Motley. Postell's medium-length hair and tangled beard were greying. His belly spilled over his pants.

"You have the right to remain silent," a deputy clerk told Postell. "Anything you say, other than to your attorney, can be used against you."

"I'm a lawyer," Postell replied.

Motley ignored the seemingly bizarre assertion, mulling over whether Postell, charged with unlawful entry, posed a flight risk. "I have to return," Postell protested, offering a convoluted explanation: "I passed the Bar at Catholic University, was admitted to Constitution Hall. I swore the Oath of Office as an attorney at Constitution Hall in 1979; graduated from Harvard Law School in 1979."

That got Motley's attention. "Mr Postell, so did I. I remember you."

This homeless man - who totes his belongings in white plastic bags, haunts a downtown intersection and sometimes sleeps at a church - studied law alongside US Chief Justice John Roberts and former Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold. All of them graduated from Harvard in 1979.

Alfred Postell, a diagnosed schizophrenic, has degrees from Strayer College and the Univeristy of Maryland, besides Harvard Law. Photo / Family photo

In a city with thousands of homeless people, Postell may be its most academically distinguished. He holds three degrees: one in accounting, one in economics, and one in law. On a summer evening, he sits inside a McDonald's, a white towel wrapped around his head like a turban. Listening to him talk about his life is like dive-bombing into a dream. Everything at first sounds normal. But things quickly fall into disorder. The chronology hiccups. Incongruous thoughts collide. "Charleston. I owned property there, in the city proper. The cotton fields were past the city limits. The cotton fields: They were past the city limits. I picked cotton once in my life. But the cotton fields were past the city limits. I lived within the city. We had property there. We inherited the property. Shortly thereafter, I drove to San Diego, California. I was in love with a girl."

But these pronouncements always arc back to a single idea. It anchors Postell in the turbulent waters of his schizophrenia. Postell, he tells himself and others, is an educated man. He worked hard. He did right. Born in 1948, he was the only child of a seamstress and a man who installed and fixed awnings. He grew up knowing what it meant to live without. He was a normal boy, says his mother, Ruth Priest, but always focused and motivated. He wanted more than what his parents had. So after graduating from Coolidge High School here, he juggled a day job while working his way through an associate's degree at Strayer College. He passed the CPA exam and took a job as the audit manager at an accounting firm, Lucas and Tucker, where he said he pulled in an annual salary of more than US$50,000 - big money back then. But Postell wasn't done. He went to the University of Maryland for a degree in economics. Then, even before he'd graduated, he applied to Harvard Law - and was accepted.

The 1979 Harvard Law School yearbook shows Postell at 31 with a neatly trimmed moustache and receding hairline. He bears the look of a man who has already had success in life. And expects much more. Classmate Marvin Bagwell remembers him arriving to class in a coat and bow tie. "There was a very quiet dignity about him," says Bagwell, vice-president at an insurance company. "He was brilliant and could ask introspective questions that got to the core of the matter." Echoes of that sentiment emerged in interviews with five classmates. "He worked extremely hard and was extremely disciplined," says classmate Piper Kent-Marshall, a longtime senior counsel with Wells Fargo. And he was immaculately dressed and groomed. "I wouldn't have been surprised if someone told me he manicured his nails," another classmate says.

That's why the Harvard grads were so surprised to learn what had become of Postell. How could this man end up eking out an all-but invisible existence on the fringes of the capital?

If there are clues to what precipitated Postell's descent into schizophrenia, they're buried in the years after he graduated and returned to the District of Columbia. He took a job at a respected law firm. But it let him go a few years later. Three lawyers who remembered him couldn't or wouldn't say why.

Schizophrenia creeps. Some people, especially those as accomplished as Postell, can hide their symptoms for months. As the victim withdraws from social and work life, plunging into isolation, relatives, friends and co-workers may not notice anything amiss. Then there's a snap. Psychologists refer to this moment as a "psychotic break" or a "first break". It's when a victim's slackening grip on reality ruptures, cleaving their lives into before and after. "This kind of rapid decline is sadly not uncommon," says Richard Bebout, director of Green Door, a mental-illness centre that works with the homeless.

"He had all of these fancy things," says one relative, LaTonya Sellers Postell. "He was living the rich life. Then he just all of a sudden, he bugged out ... He lost all of his material things. It's been crazy. Absolutely crazy." Even his mother, now 85, can't explain what happened. A darkness one day fell over her son, Ruth Priest says. He kept talking about getting arrested. He thought the police were after him. Then he had a bad breakup with a woman he loved. Shortly afterward, Postell had his psychotic break.

When Postell's mother didn't think she could care for him anymore, she turned to a local pastor, Marie Carter, who took him into her home in the mid-1980s. Her daughter, now 60, thought Postell would be there for a few weeks or months. Instead he stayed decades, losing whole days to the television or lounging in a nearby park, watching people pass.

He picked up a theft charge in 1989. He also got hit with some misdemeanour charges in the 1990s. But beyond that, he's been a ghost. He drifted. He began haunting the same storefronts every day. "You get into a firm, it's prestigious," Postell says. "And when you lose that position, it's like suicide. It's all over. It's atrophy. Or as accountants say, it's to be obsolete. You know what that means? Obsolescence. Beyond your useful life. I was beyond my useful life."

There is hope for Postell. The mental health team at Green Door has begun working with him, as has Pathways to Housing, another organisation that helps the homeless. His mother has tried to scrape together some money to get him off the street. But none of that seems to interest Postell as he sits alone on the street. Newspapers are scattered about his feet. He picks up one. "The newspaper used the term 'troglodyte'. Troglodyte: Cave dweller."

Postell then loses himself in memories. "I lived in an apartment building in Presidential Towers. I could be considered a cave dweller. I had a balcony. A balcony on the top floor. An apartment on the top floor of the Presidential Towers. I could be considered a cave dweller."