When Elizabeth Marie Torres was a child, she could wow family and friends with an uncanny ability to recite her ABCs backward, starting at any letter of the alphabet. 

“She was really smart,” Torres’ mother, Silvia Irigoyen-Adame, remembers. “People would challenge her and she would say it right away.” 

Quiet and shy, Torres grew up in Chula Vista, where she was born in 1990 at Scripps Mercy Hospital. Her mostly happy, uneventful childhood ended abruptly in 2005, when her parents divorced. Three years later, Torres’ longtime boyfriend, the man she intended to marry, died of leukemia on her 18th birthday. 

“That was the start of the bad,” Irigoyen-Adame said. “She clamped up. Didn’t want to go anywhere. Didn’t want to do anything. Didn’t want to go to counseling.” 

Torres earned her GED and trained to become a medical assistant at Southwestern College. But already her life was veering off track. She gave birth to a son, Alejandro Camacho, with a man she met shortly after her boyfriend died. 

She started a medical assistant internship and soon began disappearing for days at a time with a new group of friends. 

“I was starting to lose her little by little,” Irigoyen-Adame said. “She was with the wrong crowd, and that’s where the drugs came from.” 

Someone introduced Torres to methamphetamine. Her visits home dwindled then all but stopped. Irigoyen-Adame and her partner—now her husband—Frank Adame, took charge of Torres’ son, and later a daughter Torres had with another man. 

Torres was arrested and spent a few nights in jail in connection with a car break-in. Eventually, Irigoyen-Adame found her daughter living in a tent near the Sweetwater River. 

“She wanted help,” Irigoyen-Adame said. But every avenue the family pursued—rehab, a social worker, a psychiatric hospital, city outreach workers—seemed unable to provide the right service at the right time to guide Torres back to sobriety and stability. 

In May of this year, Torres told her mother she’d tried to check herself into Chula Vista Village at Otay, a recently opened city-run tent shelter near Otay Valley Regional Park. Irigoyen-Adame said her daughter showed her an email instructing Torres to fill out an online intake form to determine her eligibility for help. 

Irigoyen-Adame doesn’t know whether her daughter ever followed the email’s instructions. A few months later, in late August, Torres called to ask Irigoyen-Adame for help moving her tent from one street to another near the city’s southwestern border. 

“We gathered her things and took her things to Industrial [Boulevard],” Irigoyen-Adame said. “I gave her some fruit and money and clothes.” 

A week later, Torres was found unresponsive in a tent on the other side of the city, near Bayfront Park. A man emerged from the tent shouting, “Help me, help me, help me, she’s not breathing,” Irigoyen-Adame said, recounting the story she’d heard from eyewitnesses. 

Torres was rushed to Scripps Mercy Hospital—the same hospital where she’d been born 34 years earlier—and placed on life support. She was pronounced dead on Sept. 6 of acute methamphetamine and fentanyl intoxication, according to a county medical examiner’s report. 

Torres’ death has not yet been recorded in San Diego County’s quarterly report of countywide drug overdoses. In 2022, the latest year for which figures are available, 977 county residents were killed by drugs. When equivalent figures are compiled for 2024, Elizabeth Torres will be one of the people whose lives—and deaths—are recorded in an anonymous statistic. 

From her mother’s perspective, Torres’ death stands as an indictment of what she called “a failed broken system that will not allow anyone to get the help needed.” 

“I really tried to help her so many times,” Irigoyen-Adame said of her daughter. “And it just failed all the time. It shouldn’t have been that hard to get help for her.” 

Since her daughter died, Irigoyen-Adame has appeared before the Chula Vista City Council twice, on Sept. 17 and again on Oct. 8, berating officials both times for what she described as the city’s heartless, confusing process for helping homeless people. 

“When I asked for help, I got no help from anybody,” Irigoyen-Adame said to councilmembers during the Sept. 17 meeting. “I asked. I called. I begged. I got nothing…[City outreach workers] just go out there and do surveys. They don’t help them.” 

Leaders in San Diego County’s vast system for serving, housing and advocating for homeless residents agree with Torres that the system’s current track record with homeless drug users is “a disaster,” said John Brady, an advisory board member with the San Diego Regional Taskforce on Homelessness. 

In a September interview, Brady listed a range of shortcomings: Lack of coordination between service providers and public agencies; lack of affordable housing; and lack of drug and psychiatric treatment facilities. 

San Diego County has just 78 contracted detox beds able to serve indigent patients on Medi-Cal, the state-run program for low-income Californians. The shortage is part of an overall drug treatment system that all participants agree is overwhelmed and unable to meet current or future needs. 

“It’s a very frustrating situation we’re in right now,” Brady said. 

Torres’ story illustrates a less-discussed but equally complicating factor: The sheer logistical challenge of helping chronic drug users, whose destabilized lives typically offer windows of opportunity for treatment that are few, fleeting and require almost immediate action. 

Telling her daughter’s story, Irigoyen-Adame takes pains to counter a common stereotype, that homeless drug users choose, and enjoy, their lifestyle. Torres may have chosen to start using drugs, her mother said, but she certainly didn’t love the experience once addiction took hold. 

“She was ashamed,” Irigoyen-Adame said. “She said she was embarrassed and didn’t want her kids to see her like that…It was not my daughter anymore. She was not the same person.” 

Yet, Torres frequently ignored or rejected her family’s efforts to help her. “She had everything,” Irigoyen-Adame said her daughter would tell her. “She didn’t need anything…When I put her in [a] rehab center, she said, ‘I can’t relate to people here,’” and left the program. “She was an adult, and it’s harder to deal with an adult because she thinks she knows what she’s doing and I can’t force her to do anything.” 

The National Institute on Drug Abuse, a federal research agency, describes drug addiction as “a chronic, relapsing disease” that causes “functional and molecular changes in the brain.” Among those changes is damage to parts of the brain that control decision-making. The longer people use drugs, according to researchers, the less their brains are able to stop. 

Periodically, something would happen prompting Torres to ask her mother for help. The moments were unpredictable and often came when Irigoyen-Adame was working or trying to care for Torres’ two children. Irigoyen-Adame would leap into action anyway. 

Over the years, she enrolled her daughter in a residential treatment program for women in San Diego, begged a judge to send Torres to counseling, had her committed in a psychiatric hospital, tried to get her into a detox facility and begged her to follow up with Chula Vista’s transitional tent shelter. 

Each time, the necessary service was either unavailable, closed for the weekend, didn’t specialize in Torres’ needs or simply turned her down. By the time the right service was available, Torres was back on the street or had changed her mind. 

“She slipped through the cracks,” Irigoyen-Adame said. “I don’t have the money to put her in an expensive rehab…I’m sure I’m not the only parent who has been through this hell.” 

Irigoyen-Adame said her daughter’s failure to gain entrance to the city-run tent shelter was especially frustrating because it was Torres’ last serious effort to get help, and because city officials often point to the program as evidence of their commitment to helping homeless residents. 

“They make it really difficult to get into those places,” Irigoyen-Adame said. “They don’t want people with problems…They need people to say, ‘We’ll help you no matter what, even if you fail.’” 

Angelica Davis, a homeless solutions manager for the city of Chula Vista, said she and her city’s 12-member homeless outreach team frequently hear such complaints from homeless residents and their advocates. 

But she said many claims made about the city’s homeless services—that they do not serve drug users, that they turn away people with problems or that they seek only to clear encampments—are not true. 

“I would say we’re extremely low-barrier,” Davis said of the city’s transitional tent shelter. “We have some rules in place for the security and safety of clients. If you’re trying to bring in drugs or alcohol or weapons, or are not willing to work with the program, you would not be let in.” 

Otherwise, “if someone expresses interest in shelter, we assess their situation [and] connect them with services,” Davis said. Services offered by the city range from shelter to rent subsidies, referrals to detox and drug treatment, a planned supportive housing project and specialized programs for veterans and seniors. 

Davis said that, as of September, 57 of the transitional tent shelter’s 65 beds were occupied by people in various stages of progress from the streets into housing. 

Davis said that, rather than lack of services, “drugs is the thing that makes it hardest for people to transition off the streets…Clients say yes [to an offer of help], they get on the truck and when they get to the shelter, they say no and don’t enter.” 

Researchers and treatment providers debate the right combination of compassion and coercion required to help homeless drug users transition to housing and sobriety. Roughly 45 percent of Chula Vista homeless residents surveyed in a recent count said they had an alcohol or drug use disorder, according to a city report. Of the city’s 786 homeless residents, just 12 were placed in a detox facility over the past year, according to the report. Most contacted by outreach workers—536, according to the report—declined offers of service. 

A new state law expected to take effect in San Diego County starting in January will expand public authorities’ ability to force people with acute drug and alcohol problems into treatment even if they refuse. The law remains controversial, and advocates for homeless drug users say lack of treatment options remains a barrier, despite ongoing county efforts to expand capacity. 

While policymakers debate solutions, Irigoyen-Adame said she has begun trying to help other homeless people transition off the street, in part to atone for a sense of guilt she feels about her daughter’s death. 

During some of her final conversations with Torres, Irigoyen-Adame said, “I told her, ‘Liz, I can’t help you anymore…Mija, I have to leave you in God’s hands because I can’t do this anymore.’ And I guess maybe he decided to take her. I think maybe if I hadn’t said those words she would still be here.” 

Irigoyen-Adame learned that her daughter had overdosed from her ex-husband, who received a call from the hospital. Irigoyen-Adame rushed to the intensive care unit. 

Torres “looked like she was asleep,” Irigoyen-Adame recalled. Her heart had already stopped beating multiple times on the way to the hospital. Doctors said there was nothing further they could do. “It was so hard for me to decide to take her off life support,” Irigoyen-Adame said. “It was really hard for me to make that decision.” 

Irigoyen-Adame decided that her daughter would have wanted to serve others by donating her organs. The last time she saw Torres, she was being wheeled into an operating room for organ donation. “They had put a braid in her hair at the hospital,” Irigoyen-Adame said. “Her eyebrows were perfectly done. Her face was perfect. She looked asleep. Peaceful.” 

Torres’ last moments on the streets remain a mystery. Irigoyen-Adame said she went to the place where her daughter died and questioned homeless people there, as well as friends of Torres near the Sweetwater River, where her daughter had spent much of her time. 

“I come with flowers and people offer condolences and I ask who that guy was [who gave Torres a fatal dose of drugs] and they give different names,” Irigoyen-Adame said. “Police say she was alone in the tent but the medical examiner says she was with her boyfriend.” 

A small wooden cross etched with Torres’ name marks the spot on Bay Boulevard where Torres overdosed. The cross is surrounded by flowers, candles and handwritten cards. There are low-slung office buildings nearby. Traffic on Interstate 5 hums in the distance. 

Torres was buried on Oct. 1 at Glen Abbey Memorial Park and Mortuary in Bonita. The service, presided over by a Catholic priest, was attended by Torres’ extended family and several of the homeless people she spent time with on the streets. Her ashes rest near the graves of her grandfather and two uncles, who are also buried at the cemetery. 

The service announcement included a message from Irigoyen-Adame to her daughter: “I love you so much, my baby girl. You’re in my heart Forever, until we meet Again. Momma.”