PORTLAND Ore. (KPTV) - On the longest night of the year, communities across Portland came together on Saturday to grieve those who lost their lives while living unhoused.
At vigils in Portland and Oregon City, each name read was someone's parent, sibling or friend.
For Stephanie Hollingshead, one such person was Jaegger Tipps. She described him as caring and fun to be around. She said she loved him unconditionally and it hurt to watch him begin his struggle with addiction.
"Everyone battles their own demons and their own stories and we want to make sure they know that no matter what they're going through someone does love them," Hollingshead said.
Hollingshead works as a day center program manager at The Father's Heart in Clackamas County and said she befriended Tipps when he first came in four years ago.
"We'd be trying to make breakfast and feed everyone and he would chase us down to make sure we had pancakes," Hollingshead said. "You watch the transition of someone when they're first unhoused to where we might be at a point where we might lose them - they're just struggling beyond help at that point."
She shared Tipps' story at a Longest Night vigil in Oregon City, where he was memorialized alongside 39 others from the county.
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Hollingshead said National Homeless Persons Memorial Day is unfortunately timely this year, as the center learned of a death just this morning and has been attempting to track down a missing client.
"I think the stigma right now is that everyone that is unhoused or living on the streets is some drug-addicted person or mental illness or all these things," she said. "While they may be components of what we're seeing, they're not the overall reason of why someone would end up outside."
In Portland, people shared similar stories, as advocacy organizations gave out food, coats, and resources to the hundreds who came.
"I hear the stories and the tragedies every day, and a lot of them are so large I'm so surprised we don't hear them," said Kristle Delihanty, executive director of PDX Saints Love.
She participated in the reading of more than 100 names at the vigil held in Northwest Portland. This week, Multnomah County's Domicile Unknown report identified 456 deaths among the unhoused in 2023.
Delihanty remembers her friend killed in a hit-and-run in Southeast Portland just this month.
"This was a person with a wife and children that was living unhoused," Delihanty said. "His wife watched him die in the middle of the street. No one was ever charged for that and there was nothing ever really that big done for him - I knew him for years. His story was so big and his heart was so big."