Lawrence’s homeless community was reeling Friday from the death of a woman found lying on the ground in the middle of the night in the gazebo at Buford M. Watson Jr. Park.

No official cause of death has been released for 34-year-old Michelle R. Begay, but Lawrence Police spokesman Detective David Anderson said it didn’t appear it was foul play. He said a coroner likely would look into whether exposure to frigid temperatures or alcohol were contributing factors.

The death came the same day a front-page story in the Journal-World aired concerns of downtown business owners upset about what they perceived as increasing problems with aggressive panhandling, loitering and other issues related to the city’s homeless population.

Social-service leaders who work with the homeless called a 2 p.m. meeting at Lawrence Interdenominational Nutrition Kitchen for people to talk about Begay’s death and the concerns raised in the story. Some came to vent frustrations, but the meeting turned into an impromptu memorial for Begay, said Joel Pollock, operations manager for the open shelter.

“It’s extremely complex, because we have these two incidents happening at the same time,” he said. “People are having a hard time seeing the loss of someone they knew. It just came at a bad time, so everybody is upset and scared and grieving all at once.”

Blankets distributed

An employee in coroner Erik Mitchell’s office said Begay’s exact cause of death wouldn’t be known until toxicology tests were complete, a process that could take from six to eight weeks.

A man who said he was going through downtown handing out blankets to people sleeping outside told police he came across Begay’s body about 3:30 a.m. as she lay on the ground next to her boyfriend.

Begay, who acquaintances say had a beautiful smile and frequently asked people to pray for her, had been barred temporarily from staying at the Lawrence Open Shelter, 944 Ky.

Friends mourn the loss of Michelle R. Begay on Friday. Begay, 34, was found dead early Friday morning at Buford M. Watson Jr. Park.

The man who found her, Henry Morales, sometimes stays at the open shelter. Early Friday, he said, he decided to bring blankets from the shelter to a group of about eight people including Begay who were intoxicated and sleeping outside. He said that when he saw Begay she was lying face-down with bruises on her face and blood on her cheek.

“I was trying to talk to her, and I said ‘Hey! Hey! Hello? Are you awake? Wake up.’ No response,” Morales said. “So I started moving her. It didn’t seem right the way she was lying down.”

Morales said he realized she was dead, then called for help.

Addressing ‘real issues’

Several who knew Begay described her as sweet but troubled.

“When she smiled, it was beautiful, just like a radiant moon,” said Bill Sims, who stays at the open shelter.

Loring Henderson, director of the shelter, declined to discuss why Begay was banned from the center, which holds 21 people and regularly turns away from four to 10 people per night.

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Begay spent days drinking with friends while walking the alleys downtown or sitting on a concrete ledge on the edge of a parking lot outside the Community Drop-In Center, 214 W. 10th St., said Hubbard Collinsworth, 57. Within the past two weeks, she’d been taken to Lawrence Memorial Hospital for an alcohol-related health problem, Collinsworth said.

Collinsworth and Dane Norwood, who volunteers at the drop-in center, both said they thought Begay was an example of a person whose needs weren’t being met by local social services for the homeless.

Though downtown Lawrence has places for people to sleep at night, it doesn’t have a comprehensive agency where people can get help turning their lives around, they said.

“There’s no place to empower them or address the real issues,” Collinsworth said. “It’s fragmented.”

Though many in the homeless community were upset by comments in the news story, Collinsworth pointed out that business leaders should be given credit for speaking out about their concerns. He regularly attends meetings of the Lawrence Coalition on Homeless Concerns, and said only four or so people who are homeless show up.

Business leaders “made their concerns known. They went to City Hall,” he said.

Anger, fear

Others said the city’s homeless population was getting a bad name from the actions of a small group of people. Pollock said about a dozen people approached him Friday worried that because of the report on the meeting, people downtown would have an excuse to abuse them or antagonize them.

Open-shelter patron Sims said people needed to look at specific problems, not criticize the homeless in blanket terms.

“People feel they’ve been attacked,” he said. “If there’s a problem with aggressive panhandling, they need to go after aggressive panhandling. If there’s a problem with people sleeping on roofs, they need to go after people sleeping on the roofs.”

Sims said there was a lot of “internal friction” in the homeless community these days. He said some people felt they were entitled to get drunk, have a good time, flop somewhere for the night, and do it all over again — and he questioned whether police are doing enough to enforce public-intoxication laws.

Henderson, the open shelter’s director, said he had a constructive talk Friday with Maria Martin, executive director of Downtown Lawrence Inc., the merchants’ group. The two agreed there were issues they could work on together, he said.

“We are one community,” he said. “We are not one group against another.”