Through The Cracks | Episode 4: Almost Like Jail (Transcript) 

Jonquilyn Hill: I​ 'm Jonquilyn Hill and from WAMU and PRX, this is Through The 
Cracks, a podcast about the gaps in our society and the people who fall through 
them. 

Relisha Rudd: R
​ -E-L-I-S-H-A 

Antonio Wheeler: ​Last thing I remember was Relisha telling me she's coming back. 
She's going to her aunt's house. She done never came back. 

Jonquilyn Hill: T
​ his season on Through The Cracks, we're investigating the 
disappearance of Relisha Rudd. Relisha disappeared when she was eight years old 
while her family was living in a homeless shelter in southeast D.C. It took 18 days for 
anyone to realize she was missing. We're looking at the world Relisha grew up in. Her 
school, her family, her housing. 

Ashley Young: M
​ y sister, her kids and her baby father was staying with me in a one 
bedroom. It was small, but I didn't want them in a shelter.  

Jonquilyn Hill: W
​ as Relisha's disappearance really, as the city claimed, 
unpreventable? 

Beth Mellen Harrison:​ I guess I would prefer to focus...I know you asked me, like, 
what more could she have done? But I kind of want to focus instead on what more 
can the system do for somebody like Ms. Young. 

Jonquilyn Hill: O
​ n this episode, the shelter where Relisha lived. 

After Relisha’s family was evicted from their apartment, they had to figure out where 
to sleep. They crashed on family members’ couches for a while, but eventually they 
exhausted their options and had no place to go. 

Antonio Wheeler: ​It was Shamika's idea to go to the shelter. I didn't want to go. She 
just asked me to go to the shelter because people kept putting us out and it was 
snowing and we had kids. So it's like, OK. 

Jonquilyn Hill: L
​ ast summer, I met up with Antonio Wheeler, Relisha's stepfather, in 
a park near the apartment he now shares with his brother.  

Since the pandemic, we've met in open spaces to keep us both safe. I wanted to 
know how they figured out where to go, who to ask. I mean, how do you even get 
into a shelter? Do you just walk in? It turns out Antonio did what anyone in a bind 
would do. He got on his phone.  

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Antonio Wheeler: ​I was Googling shelters. You know, that was my last option. And I 
called Virginia Williams. They sent the shelter hotline van out. 

Jonquilyn Hill: H
​ e's talking about the Virginia Williams Family Resource Center. At 
the time, their office building was the first stop for unhoused families in D.C. It's 
where they run the intake process. Now, it's more complicated with the coronavirus, 
but back then, families would go to the facility on Rhode Island Avenue. It's near a 
Giant grocery store and the city's only Home Depot. It was already late when Antonio 
called the shelter hotline – outside of business hours for Virginia Williams and the 
city shelters. 

Antonio Wheeler: ​It was at night when they came and got us. So we went to 
Virginia Williams and sat in the empty building ‘til the morning until they put us in 
a hotel at the Days Inn. So we've been at a Days Inn for like almost a year because it 
took them a while to place us in the shelter.  

Jonquilyn Hill: A
​ whole year in a dingy hotel. The city used to depend on a few hotels 
as shelters, they just phased out hotel use for families at the end of 2020. In any case, 
back then, families were supposed to stay in hotels temporarily, not for a whole year.  

I've been to this particular hotel, it's in northeast D.C. on New York Avenue, six lanes 
of traffic divided by a median. Not walkable by any stretch of the imagination. It has 
an airport hotel feel, despite the fact that it's nowhere near an airport. There's a 
restaurant called Panda Gourmet known for its regional Chinese food attached to 
the lobby of the Days Inn. But you have to know exactly where to turn or you'll end 
up on Route 50 headed straight out of town.  

My introduction to that part of town was back in college. I was going to clubs, music 
venues and yes, a strip club steakhouse known for its chicken wings that you 
probably heard about in a Drake song. 

Drake: ​Man I'm up in Stadium in D.C. still tippin'. 

Jonquilyn Hill: I​ t was the destination for 21st birthdays. Needless to say, families with 
small children were not the first thing that came to mind. Back when I was partying 
near the stretch of New York Ave., I had no clue that just a short walk away, 
unhoused families were being sheltered. This Relisha and her family's home from 
the winter of 2012 to the winter of 2013. Four kids, two parents, one hotel room. 
Finally, in 2013, the family moved from the hotel to the D.C. General Family Shelter 
about three miles away in southeast D.C.  

Antonio Wheeler: ​It was good when we first got in the shelter. 

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You know, everybody was nice. Um, I ain't want to be there. I ain’t want my kids 
there. 

Jonquilyn Hill: W​ hen the family moved in, D.C. General had been used as a shelter 
for 13 years. Before that, it was a hospital, D.C. General Hospital.  

This building had a history. The hospital closed in 2001, and the city didn't have a 
public hospital for nine years. Most of the patients it served when it was open, were 
poor and Black. When the hospital closed, it became a hypothermia shelter during 
the cold winter months.  

D.C. General, the shelter, was supposed to be temporary. But because of the large 
numbers of people the city needed to house, it ended up operating all year long. 
When Relisha and her brothers were staying at D.C. General, they were just four of 
more than 600 children living there.  

Jonquilyn Hill: S ​ o we're walking down this ramp towards D.C., General, this is how I 
got to it last time. It looks like it might be gated off. D.C. General is right next to the 
corrections facility. It's in between the corrections facility and the methadone clinic. 
We're here to see what D.C. General looks like now that it's closed. It closed at the 
end of 2018. 

And there's a lot of construction. There's fences up, cranes moving, buildings being 
torn down. Looks like a construction zone here in southeast D.C. It...you know, it's 
gone, this little girl and this place that was so tied to her memory, are gone now.  

Jonquilyn Hill: I​ wanted to go back in time. I wanted a bigger picture of what it was 
like for Relisha to live there, so I talked to three different people, someone who 
moved in after Relisha's disappearance, someone who worked to make the shelter a 
better place to live. And, of course, Antonio, Relisha's stepdad. First, Lakia Barnett. 

Lakia Barnett, former D.C. General resident: ​You know, why would we have to go 
here? Look at this place; it's an old hospital. I'm just being transparent. Old hospital. 
And you guys got a bunch of families in here, like? No. 

Jonquilyn Hill: L
​ akia moved into the shelter in 2016 with her husband and three 
children. This was a couple of years after Relisha went missing, but Lakia still felt her 
presence in the shelter. 

Relisha haunted D.C. General like a ghost. 

Lakia Barnett, former D.C. General resident: ​Also about the little girl, you know, 
that had disappeared from there that was right in the shelter. So that threw me off, 

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too. We were hearing so much and was hearing that staff knew all kinds of stories. 
It was like roaming around my head. And I was like, I don't want to be here.  

Jonquilyn Hill: L
​ akia said D.C. General made them feel dehumanized. Every time 
they came home, they had to pass through security.  

Lakia Barnett: ​Well, the horror stories for me was the fact that we had to get 
patted down when we come in the building. And it was almost like jail. 

You have to put your stuff on the little thing that actually scans and just checks to 
see if there's anything in your bag. So that process was very devastating to me 
because all of these people that may have been coming in all at the same time...We 
had to kind of like sit and wait when we first got there, so to me it felt like this is 
what they do in jail. At least, this is what I heard they do in jail; I've never been. We 
understand the safety of it, but like, that was a little scary. 

And then sometimes we encounter...It could be rude security guards, you know, 
everybody's not friendly. Maybe they don't like their job and they just impose it on us 
or vice versa. If you look around, you can be hearing about the residents, the people 
that are in the building, flipping out on security guards. So it was a lot of different 
emotions, I think, at that time. 

Jonquilyn Hill: O
​ nce Lakia was past security, she would make her way up to the old 
hospital room assigned to her family. 

Lakia Barnett: ​While we were on the fifth floor and it literally looks like a hospital 
room. So the setup was carts. Cart beds. So, three carts on [one] side and two carts 
on the other side. Then you have your bathroom. That's it. 

Jonquilyn Hill: T
​ he bathroom was a toilet and a sink. Dorm style showers were down 
the hall. Sometimes residents would bath their kids in the bathroom sink rather than 
taking them to the showers. 

Lakia Barnett: ​Then we would take the kids to like Playtime. Project Playtime was a 
big help to a lot of children in that shelter. Those people were a big help. It was an 
outlet for children to go play with other kids. It was an outlet for them to go do 
things. They would take field trips. They would do all of that stuff. So Project 
Playtime was actually a lot of peoples' savior in that shelter.  

Jonquilyn Hill: S​ he's talking about the Homeless Children's Playtime Project. This is 
a program that offers free childcare in the form of playtime a few hours every week 
at shelters all over D.C. The tape you heard at the beginning of the show? 

Relisha Rudd: R
​ -E-L-I-S-H-A 

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Jonquilyn Hill: T
​ his audio of Relisha...it comes from a video that the Playtime Project 
made for marketing purposes. If you Google "Relisha Rudd," most of the photos you 
see of her and the photo on her missing poster, came from the Playtime Project. 
Everyone I talked to said Relisha loved going to Playtime, just like Lakia's kids. 

Jamila Larson: S​ he was just really sweet and engaging. She loved to dance. She 
loved art projects.  

Jonquilyn Hill: T
​ his is Jamila Larson. She co-founded the Playtime Project. It's not a 
city program. It's a nonprofit. When it started, she was the only employee, one white 
woman with a lot of volunteers. 

She really found a home in the playroom and endeared herself to a lot of the other 
children and volunteers. And we still have a lot of her art projects and pictures of her 
engaging with all of our activities in the playground. Even though she's very 
protective of her little brother, she really enjoyed having that time to be a child 
herself. And that's one thing we tried to do to help, especially with those older kids in 
the family. Like, you are an amazing big sister, but this is your time to be a child and 
really let her be her. Be eight years old in the playroom.  

Jonquilyn Hill: T
​ he Playtime Project tried to make the shelter more kid-friendly. A lot 
of what they did was just temporary, like tape on the floor to map out a game of 
hopscotch. But sometimes the changes were more substantial. 

Jamila Larson: S ​ o we were finally able to renovate the waiting room of the former 
hospital into this beautiful state-of-the-art pre-teen and teen center. We had a 
former Metropolitan Police Department conference room that we had renovated 
several years earlier into a beautiful baby room and another space that was kind of 
like a classroom that we renovated into a preteen room. And then we took over the 
hallways. We painted murals with the help of Capitol Hill Arts Workshop that the 
kids helped design. But then we bumped up against the bureaucracy every now 
and then where someone came out and said, hey, you're defacing government 
property. Do you have the permits to do this? 

Jonquilyn Hill: R
​ emember, D.C. General was a former hospital, an abandoned 
former hospital. 

Jamila Larson: G​ o behind any double doors and it looks like the scene of a horror 
movie. Boxes of medical records. It was really shocking. Office supplies. It really 
looked like there was a nuclear bomb and people just left. They left a lot of things in 
those rooms back there.  

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Jonquilyn Hill: S
​ o it was a weird environment inside and needed a lot of sprucing up 
to make it more kid-friendly. And outside, they needed to do some work, too. 

Jonquilyn Hill: C​ hildren need a playground, any apartment complex of that 

magnitude would obviously have a playground. Jamila wanted to build a permanent 
playground using private funding. But, the city balked. There was a park a few blocks 
away, they said. Couldn't the families just walk there? The streets were lined with 
trees. Certainly it would be good exercise. Jamila thinks that the mayor's office at the 
time –the Vincent Gray administration– didn't like the way it would look.  

Jamila Larson:​ Playgrounds symbolizes permanence and play, and it wasn't 

anything that they wanted to be associated with D.C. General at the time. The 
playground would almost enshrine the fact that there are children here and we 
were constantly bumping up against the clear reality that the children in D.C. 
General were not valued. 

Jonquilyn Hill: T
​ he playground eventually got built, but only after Relisha's 
disappearance. There's one last story I want to share from Jamila. When D.C. General 
turned from a hospital into a shelter, the city did a half-assed job changing the street 
signs. Some of them still directed you to D.C. General Hospital, not a shelter. If you 
were in a hurry, it was easy to think it was still a hospital.  

Jamila Larson: O​ nce after Playtime, our staff person told me that a man had 
dropped off his friend, thinking that it was still an emergency room and his friend 
had a gunshot wound to his leg and he was sitting in the what used to be the 
waiting room. And there's blood dripping and families were really panicking. And so 
that gives you a sense of, on the outside, it still look like a hospital. 

The city never was all in to say, you know, this is a family shelter; let's make the best 
of it. Let's make it safe. Let's make it bright. That really wasn't the case. And I was 
very clear. 

Jonquilyn Hill: W
​ e've reached out to the city for a response, but it's complicated. 
Who is actually responsible here? Who do we even ask for a response?  

We'll get into that in just a few minutes. After the break, the family meets Kahlil 
Tatum. 

– 

Jonquilyn Hill: T
​ here's more to Through The Cracks than what you hear on the 
podcast. On our website, you can find bonus material like a timeline of Russia's 
disappearance and a map. You can also sign up for our email list, where I share 
behind-the-scenes stories about making the show. If you subscribe, you'll be the first 

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to hear about future seasons of the podcast. So head to our website, 
wamu.org/ThroughTheCracks and thanks.  

Antonio Wheeler: ​It wasn't for no family. 

Jonquilyn Hill: T
​ his is Antonio Wheeler again, Relisha's stepdad.  

It took some time, but he and his family adjusted to life in the shelter. 

Antonio Wheeler: ​There wasn't no good living conditions. They just serve us moldy 
food. So at that point, you know, we had got coolers and ice set in our rooms. They 
were saying, you can't do that. But we were like, y'all serving us spoiled milk and 
moldy food. We had cut hot dogs open to see if it was molded on the inside.  

You know, because somebody's kid had gotten sick from moldy food. 

Jonquilyn Hill: W
​ hen it was time to eat, typically the whole family would go down to 
the cafeteria together. They'd line up and wait to be served. That's actually how they 
met Kahlil Tatum, the man who was last seen with Relisha. 

Antonio Wheeler: ​ E ​ verybody asked, how he get, how he got so close to the family. 
When I first met Kahlil Tatum, he wasn't always a janitor at the shelter; he was the 
kitchen staff, the cafeteria dude. So he was serving the kids, the families, the kids, 
the food. 

Jonquilyn Hill: A
​ nd while a lot of the staff at the shelter could be cold or wanted to 
bargain for favors, Kahlil Tatum seemed generous. 

Antonio Wheeler: ​We used to come in late for dinner, from wandering around at 
the mall or at a playground. 

When we didn't want the kids at the shelter, me and a lot of other parents would 
take our kids to another playground or whatever. So sometimes we were running 
late and he would put our food out for us and like, we can open our room door and 
the kitchen, like, right there. Like I could stick my head out and get the food. So, 
Relisha, she always wanted to help out. 

"Daddy, I'll go get the food." 

I just opened the door and watch her get the food. He would give her the food. I'd 
shut the door. No extra, no nothing, none of that. 

Jonquilyn Hill: N
​ othing extra, I think what Antonio means here is that Kahlil Tatum 
didn't come off as creepy. He didn't seem like an older man trying to groom a girl 
and her family. As far as Antonio could tell, Tatum was just someone trying to help. 

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When we asked for people's first impressions of Kahlil Tatum, the answers were 
largely positive. If anything, his kindness made him stand out among the workers at 
D.C. General. 

D.C. General had a policy not to hire people with criminal records. There's a 
conversation to be had about excluding formerly incarcerated people from job 
opportunities. But this was the policy. 

And as it turned out, Kahlil Tatum had a criminal record when he was hired to work 
at D.C. General. He'd served time for breaking and entering, larceny and burglary. So 
his working there was a policy violation. In effect, he slipped in through the cracks. 
But it's not surprising when you look at how things were run at the time.  

I went online and took a look at the shelter monitoring records for the years that 
Relisha lived there. Out of the randomly polled employee files, none had FBI or 
Metropolitan Police Department background checks. Which surprised me because I 
had to get a background check for volunteering as the leader of a Girl Scout troop in 
D.C. People who work around kids typically have to get vetted. Jamila Larson –the 
co-founder of the Playtime Project that you heard a few minutes ago– one time she 
asked a shelter resident about how staff interacted with her. Did she remember 
anything inappropriate taking place? 

Jamila Larson: S ​ he said, no, not really. And I further explored I said, so, you know, 
staff didn't, like, hit on people or anything like that. And she's like, oh yeah, that 
happens all the time. But I didn't know they weren't supposed to do that. So we 
heard a lot of stories like that, especially of security guards and other folks who just 
didn't get a lot of training or supervision or support, didn't have high expectations 
for what those safety roles were supposed to be. 

Jonquilyn Hill: S
​ o how do you figure out who's responsible for the conditions at D.C. 
General? Well, that's a tricky question. It's tricky because the responsibility has 
shifted over the years. In 1993, the federal government said to D.C., you're doing a 
lousy job running your shelters. You can't run them anymore. You need to have a 
nonprofit do this. So this is when an organization called the Community Partnership 
came into the picture. Their job was to find contractors to run the day to day 
operations for homelessness services. OK, bear with me here. This is kind of a 
bureaucratic Gordian knot. The contractor for D.C. General –yet another nonprofit 
hired by the Community Partnership– came under fire in 2010 after an explosive 
report from the Washington City Paper. In the report, several residents described 
incidents where staff members solicited sex from residents for things like extra 
blankets and juice for their kids. After that, no other contractor wanted to touch D.C. 
General, so the Community Partnership ended up running it themselves. This is not 

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something the Community Partnership normally does. We reached out to them for 
comment and they declined to speak with us. 

So, if –when– something goes wrong, who's responsible? 

Well, staff at the shelter would and did get blamed for their hiring choices. The 
Community Partnership is partially responsible, too, because they didn't enforce 
their own policies for hiring and fraternization. So they came under fire when Relisha 
went missing, but also the D.C. government for not making conditions at the shelter 
better, and the federal government because their intervention in 1993 is what got us 
here. In the end, though, you can't hold any one of these groups accountable. 

That's because, in a system this unwieldy, no one is fully responsible for the people 
who lose their housing. 

Melissa Young: "​ Oh, mom, he's cool. That's Kahlil Tatum! That's her godfather." 

No. 

"Well Kahlil is her godfather, mom. But he cool. He just takes her to play with the 
granddaughter." 

Jonquilyn Hill: O
​ n one of my visits with Relisha's grandmother, Melissa. I asked her 
about Kahlil Tatum. She told me Relisha never gave her any reason to worry about it.  

Melissa Young: W​ henever she went, she came and told everything they did. Who 
she was with, who she did it with, everything. She never had nothing negative to say 
about him, his wife or nobody. 

Jonquilyn Hill: N
​ ext time on Through The Cracks. Who is Kahlil Tatum? 

Alexis Kelly: N
​ ow, Karl was his name. Kahlil was the name, but he changed to when 
he went to prison. 

D.C. General resident: E​ verybody knows him. You know, he bought my daughter a 
fish tank. But I stopped it there. No more gifts. 

Jamila Larson: A​ lot of the teens had known him and some of them even referred 
to him affectionately as their godfather as well, and had a really hard time 
believing that he would do something like that. The teens were feeling really 
conflicted because, again, they had a hard time wrapping their head around, how 
could this man that we trusted and seen, who was nice to us, do something like 
that? 

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Jonquilyn Hill: T
​ hrough The Cracks is a production of WAMU and PRX. This podcast 
was made possible in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private 
corporation funded by the American people and also by the Fund for Investigative 
Journalism. 

Patrick Fort is our producer, Ruth Tam is our digital editor and Poncie Rutsch is our 
senior producer. Our editor is Curtis Fox. Mike Kidd mixed this episode. Osei Hill 
designed our logo. Monna Kashfi oversees all the content we make here at WAMU. 
You can find out more about the show at WAMU.org/ThroughTheCracks. You can 
also sign up for email updates. That way you'll be the first to know when we drop a 
new episode or bonus content. Our podcast would not be possible without the 
generosity of listeners like you to support the investigative reporting that powers 
Through The Cracks. Give at WAMU.org/SupportThroughTheCracks. I'm Jonquilyn 
Hill. We'll be back next Thursday with another episode. Thanks for listening.  

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