How this started.

In 2021 I had a commercial and residential cleaning business in San Antonio, Texas, where I’m from. I had a team of cleaners and we were doing COVID cleanups. Then I caught COVID and lost my business.

I lost everything.

A lot of people lost businesses in those years. It hit me the hardest. I lost my mind. I started using.

I got in my truck and drove west.

By the end of 2022 we were in Oceanside, then San Diego, on foot.

Every city had organizations that said they helped people on the street.

There were nights in Colorado we slept in the car because there was nowhere else, and the cold did not care that we had made the calls.

We got stuck in Old Town San Diego for about a year.

That is where it changed.

I got tired of being tired. I could not work out how I got there. And one day it landed:

nobody is coming.

If that is true, then who is going to help me?

I had a phone.

In 2023 I called my mother and asked if I could stay with her while I got on my feet. I took the Amtrak to Fairfield, then moved to Vallejo for a window cleaning job.

That is where I met the people who are still my friends today.

I asked them questions.

I kept hearing the answers I had lived —

In June 2024 I was at Wilson Park in Vallejo visiting friends when the sweep came through.

That day gave me a purpose.

Commissioner Bre Jackson’s daughter heard what I was doing in the city and told her mother — that I had run a survey, and that I said I had found a solution to Vallejo’s homeless problem. The Commissioner invited me to speak.

I brought the survey to the Housing and Community Development Commission and gave my presentation. Commissioner Jackson wanted to hear more about the solution. She has been building the program with me ever since.

What I built is called Operation Iron Gate.

It exists because of one thing I learned on the street and confirmed in that survey:

people do not fall out of the system by accident. They fall out at the handoff, and nobody finds out.