MOULTRIE — On the outside, Matthew May and Zekevis Williams could not be more different.

Williams sports short, spiky dreads, and May’s head is clean-shaven. May is rather thin. Williams is a bit husky. 

In other ways, they are mirror images. 

Bad decisions in the past put the Colquitt County men in similar circumstances: lost relationships — family and friends, including the two children that each has and with whom they have little or no visitation privileges — legal issues related to methamphetamine and uncertain housing situations.

They are homeless. 

Williams is sleeping on friends’ couches after a stint of being on the streets. May, after a lengthy term of homelessness, jail and then more time without a home, has moved into a small camper.

May, 34, got into drugs — marijuana and alcohol — at 9 years old, he said.

“At 15, I was an addict,” he said, dressed in jeans and flip-flops at a morning Bible study. “My dad kicked me out of the house. He had no choice.”

By 20, he was using methamphetamine and “at 29 it really got bad.”

Along the way, he had good jobs, a wife and family and eventually lost them all. He dropped 120 pounds, going from 280 to 160 due to meth.

After living under a bridge for six months, he said, a buddy picked him up one day while he was walking to a store. At first it seemed like a lucky break when his friend offered to let him stay at his place.

That hospitality was short-lived as the friend eventually told May he would have to pull his weight by becoming a business partner of sorts.

“What he done was steal stuff and sell meth,” May said. “I ended up being the fall guy. Eight months later, I’m looking at 23 years in prison. I’m glad it happened; getting in that trouble saved my life.”

In 2013, Williams was in a car with a friend and two other occupants when they drove into a road block in Brooks County. The officers were suspicious and during a search of the car found an ounce and a half of crystal meth.

He spent two years in jail before the adjudication of the case. He pleaded guilty to possession of a drug-related object and was released for time served. His friend was convicted of possession with intent to distribute and got a prison sentence.

After his release, Williams, 27, continued using meth and other drugs. 

Now, dressed in a blue Polo-style shirt and blue jeans — clothes donated by a community member — and cleanly shaved, it’s unlikely anyone looking at him would guess he is among the ranks of the homeless.

Since their spiral into substance abuse and homelessness, May and Williams have taken steps to break their addictions and elevate their lives above the dark, turbulent, drug-infested waters they treaded for so long.

For them it was drugs. But the reporting has revealed the paths to homelessness are many, and they don’t have to be nearly as sinister or illegal as substance abuse.

It could stem from a pivotal life moment, such as a divorce or a layoff. It could be a mental illness slowly ravaging the mind and driving a person to the streets.

It could be something vast and far beyond the control of one individual, such as the recent and costly dips in the economy.

It could be something small, like one bill that couldn’t be paid on time.

Many live on the brink of homelessness and one ripple of misfortune could send them cascading into a world with no home and no warm bed to call their own.

In the SunLight Project coverage area — Valdosta, Dalton, Tifton, Thomasville, Moultrie and Milledgeville, Ga., along with Live Oak, Jasper and Mayo, Fla., and the surrounding counties — those who fall prey to homelessness are just as diverse as the causes that leave them without a roof.

Homelessness claims young and old and people from all sorts of backgrounds.

When the Department of Housing and Urban Development counted all the country’s homeless on a single night in 2015, the number reached above half a million.

One in 10 were veterans. A quarter were children under the age of 18.

But the numbers become even more staggering when looking at homelessness over time instead of on just one night.

In a given year, 3.5 million people will experience homeless for some period of time, according to the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. An additional seven million will face an imminent risk of homelessness.

The trip from home to homeless could be as simple and as cataclysmic as one event. One life-altering event.

Avenues to Homelessness

The biggest cause of homelessness is a “life-altering event or series of events,” Roz Johnson said. 

She’s the chief clinical officer of Behavioral Health Services of South Georgia and a member of the South Central Homeless Task Force.

“The life-altering event might be you lost your job. It might be a divorce. It might be domestic violence,” Johnson said.

She said such an event normalizes the issue of homelessness “because that could happen to any of us if we get in the wrong situation.”

Homelessness can also erupt from less significant, everyday occurrences, Johnson said.

“You’ve got the type of people that are also kind of living on the brink, and one occurrence can push them over into homelessness,” she said. “That could be something like a bill they couldn’t pay. They got booted out because they didn’t pay their rent that one last time. This is kind of like the last-straw scenario.

“The car broke down and they couldn’t afford to get it fixed, so they lost the job when previously maybe they really weren’t having any major issues.

“It’s kind of always living on that edge to where that one bill pops up or that one little disaster happens, and then they’re living on the street.”

Mental illness also drives people to the street, said Ronnie Mathis, executive director of the South Georgia Partnership to End Homelessness.

“Some people that have (mental illnesses), you’ll discover that they have no family support. They’re left to try to make ends meet themselves,” Mathis said.

“When they don’t have the ability to decipher between what is more important, they end up doing some wrong things. … They have income coming in but they don’t have the ability to budget.”

Johnson said homelessness only exacerbates an individual’s mental illness and smashes a person’s quality of life to pieces.

She referenced Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, saying homeless people aren’t even obtaining basic human necessities.

“If you look at that pyramid, you have the bottom row, which is food, clothing, shelter. Then as it goes up, the top of the pyramid is self-actualization, which is where maybe many of us are — reaching our goals, doing fun things in our life, taking trips and making career steps,” Johnson said.

“That’s what makes us happy and feel good. You’re not there (if you’re homeless). You can’t possibly be there.

“You’re on the bottom and you don’t even have a place to live. The things that we get pleasure from day in and day out — our creature comforts and our hobbies and our relationships — they don’t have that.

“It’s very demoralizing to be in that situation and have to depend on help, have to go to charities. Maybe some of them even end up having to panhandle. Some of them end up doing crimes just to survive.

“I think each one of those things is like a domino effect. You’re living in the street, you have to feed your kids, so you steal something or whatever you have to do.

“You’re in survival mode, and so you’re probably going to find yourself in situations and even doing behaviors and making choices you wouldn’t have previously thought you would.”

Roy Johnson, president of Dalton’s Providence Ministries, said while many of the homeless have substance abuse issues or mental health problems, it would be a mistake to say all of them have similar troubles.

“People can become homeless for any number of reasons,” Roy Johnson said, echoing the sentiment that homelessness comes from many different circumstances. “It can be domestic violence, women fleeing abuse. It can be the loss of a job.

“A lot of people are just three or four paychecks away from being homeless. It can be medical disability. We’ve had people who have disabilities and can’t work. They’ve filed for disability payments but haven’t been approved yet, so where are they going to go?

“You can’t say any one thing causes homelessness.”

Johnson said most of the homeless he sees are from the north Georgia area.

“It used to be, a long time ago, you’d see what I guess you’d call hobos who’d be traveling around and looking for services,” he said. “You don’t see that as much these days.

“You do see somebody who came here thinking they had somebody they could stay with and that didn’t work out. Or someone’s car broke down on I-75 and they didn’t have the money to get it fixed. That sort of thing.”

Avenues to homelessness are as diverse as determining who is homeless.

Defining Homelessness

A homeless person is anyone without permanent, stable housing, but that doesn’t always mean wandering the streets and sleeping on a park bench.

“Homelessness is really broad,” said Sharah Denton, development director at LAMP homeless shelter in Valdosta. “A lot of times people say it’s what you see on TV, but you could be living in somebody’s house and that could be considered a form of homelessness.

“Or you could be living in your car. That’s a different type of homelessness. So it’s not always someone out in the streets just sleeping.”

And a homeless person may not even be an adult.

In Colquitt County, 250-300 children are homeless each year, said Denise Pope, a social worker at Norman Park Elementary School.

While that usually doesn’t mean kids living on the streets, it does include children with insecure housing. That can mean they are doubled up in housing with relatives, they frequently move from place to place, or they live in substandard housing.

Such conditions can make it more difficult for students to perform well academically, Pope said.

”It’s important for people to realize it’s not people who are on the streets,” she said. “Here, it’s people living with another family. It’s people living in housing where they don’t have water or heat coming into their houses.

“It could be the parents are incarcerated and they’re staying with someone else. It could be where a teenage girl got pregnant and her parents told her you can’t live here anymore, so she’s couch surfing.”

Ola Scott Little, a social worker in the Baldwin County School System, said “unaccompanied youth,” or children who run away from home for whatever reason, are also considered homeless by the school system.

Little said 64 students in the system are homeless this year, but added the number is likely higher.

In Florida’s Suwannee County, 354 students were reported homeless by public schools in 2015, according to the Florida Department of Children and Families Council on Homelessness. The number is up from 298 in 2014 (which was the first time since at least 2009 the county’s homeless student number was below 300).

Neighboring Hamilton County, Fla., reported 251 homeless students while Lafayette reported 208.

Nationally, homeless numbers have trended downward for the last decade, and Georgia and Florida have boasted some of the largest decreases in their homeless populations in recent years.

However, Suwannee, Hamilton, Lafayette and Columbia counties — with a combined homeless total of 1,100 — has one of the nation’s highest rates (94 percent) of unsheltered homeless people for smaller counties, according to Housing and Urban Development.

An unsheltered homeless person is someone sleeping in a place not meant for human habitation, such as the streets, abandoned buildings, vehicles or parks.

Other homeless people sleep in places such as emergency or long-term shelters or transitional housing.

A few, according to authorities, run into situations where jail becomes their housing.

Homelessness and The Law

The majority of law-enforcement agencies in the SunLight area said homeless people are not big drivers of local crime.

Yes, some do commit crime but not a lot, officials said. And the crimes usually aren’t major, they added.

It is not uncommon for homeless people to commit a minor crime on a cold night just to spend the night in the warm jail facility, said Jase Bass with Moultrie’s Life Under the Son ministry. 

“They might go to the Waffle House and eat and then say they don’t have money to pay, and then they wait for police to show up and arrest them,” he said.

Lt. Tim Watkins, chief investigator at the Thomas County Sheriff’s Office, recalled a December 2015 robbery committed by a homeless man.

“We think he committed an act to get in jail. He’s an older gentleman,” Watkins said.

Jail provides a warm place to stay in the winter, a cool place when the weather is hot, and meals — luxuries homeless people don’t normally have.

Shoplifting, petty larceny and thefts are among the crimes most commonly committed by the homeless, Watkins said.

Lt. Lee Dunston, a detective with the Tifton Police Department, said his division rarely deals with homeless people.

But sometimes homeless people will commit crimes out of desperation, Dunston said.

Often unscrupulous persons will ask a homeless person to help them cash fraudulent checks, he said, with the idea being the homeless person will take the risk for the possible reward of making a few hundred bucks by actually going into the bank to cash the checks.

If the checks are successfully cashed, then the homeless person will get a cut. If the checks are declined or the police are called, the criminal will drive off and leave the homeless person to take the fall for the crime.

Dalton Police Department Lt. Jamie Johnson agreed with other law enforcement in the region and said there isn’t a great deal of crime associated with local homeless camps.

“Really, the larger camps have had rules you had to follow if you wanted to stay there,” said Johnson, who supervises the department’s patrol operations. “They police themselves. You’ve got to be well behaved.

“That’s not to say there’s no crime. We do get reports of theft, of occasional fights. But we don’t get a lot of reports.”

Johnson said he doesn’t have any reason to believe crime is happening in the camps that isn’t being reported.

“There might be some minor things going on that don’t get reported. But I don’t think there are any major crimes that aren’t being reported,” he said. “Our officers do checks on these camps, especially in cold weather, to make sure everyone is OK.”

Staying Homeless

“I’ve run across people that don’t want to be helped. I’ve run across people that prefer sleeping in cars, that prefer sleeping in dilapidated buildings,” Ronnie Mathis said.

“I used to wonder why. But it all goes back to somewhere along the way, that person has lost his or her willingness. They’ve shunned away from society. They feel society hasn’t done good to them.”

Sharah Denton sees the same thing, saying many homeless people don’t want the responsibility of paying bills or having a job.

“There’s people who are known in this community for being homeless and they’re OK with being homeless,” Denton said. “They don’t want to be bothered. They just want to live their life.”

Roz Johnson said she doesn’t believe people are actually content to be homeless, at least not deep down.

“I don’t really truly think anybody wants to live on the streets. I think, though, that there’s people who they don’t trust,” Johnson said.

“They’ve been abused (or) let down before. They’re scared (and) their mental illness is interfering with their ability to say, ‘Let me trust this person and let me get out of my comfort zone.’

“I do think it can become some people’s comfort zone because it’s what they know.”

Johnson said people remain homeless not because they want to but because it’s the most comfortable thing for them, especially for those who have built up thick walls and guarded lives against the outside world.

For example, a homeless person with anxiety may not know how to properly interact with people, Johnson said, so he or she will opt to stay on the street to avoid social interactions in a shelter or with a roommate in transitional housing.

“It’s anxiety about ‘What is that going to be like? I’d rather be left alone. What are they going to do to me?’” Johnson said.

Next week, the SunLight Project team takes a look at what local communities are doing to fight homelessness.

The SunLight Project team of journalists who contributed to this report includes Charles Oliver, Eve Guevara, Thomas Lynn and Patti Dozier, along with the writers, Alan Mauldin and team leader John Stephen. Will Woolever and Gil Pound also contributed.

To contact the team, email sunlightproject@gaflnews.com.

Local Homeless Aid*

LAMP (Lowndes Associated Ministries to People)

Homeless Shelter (both emergency and long-term)

Day Center (for laundry, showers, toiletries, etc.)

Offers classes on money management, parenting, GED classes, resume writing, etc., and connections to community programs such as mental health counseling, marriage and family counseling and post-secondary education services.

Phone: (229) 245-7157

Website: www.lampinc.org

South Georgia Partnership to End Homelessness

Offers help with transitional housing.

Provides financial assistance for medical, transportation, education, child care, nutrition and mental health needs.

Phone: (229) 293-7301

Website: www.sgpeh.com

Salvation Army

Emergency Men’s Shelter

Offers food, such as canned goods, throughout the week.

Phone: (229) 242-6440

Website: www.salvationarmygeorgia.org/valdosta/

Behavioral Health Services

Offers housing and treatment for homeless people struggling with mental illness and substance abuse.

Phone: (229) 671-6170

Website: www.bhsga.com

The Haven

Domestic Abuse Shelter

Offers counseling for those faced with domestic violence.

Phone: (229) 244-1765

Website: www.valdostahaven.org

*Many local organizations, churches, schools and businesses aid the homeless through programs, such as food banks, and through special events and services that provide necessities, such as toiletries and clothing, to homeless people.