DALLAS — Even in those last months inside the shambles of her white-frame East Dallas home — its bathroom and kitchen plumbing blocked and broken, water-soaked floors rotted out and trash piled three feet high — 87-year-old Poldi Tonin refused to rely on anyone other than her beloved Lexi.
Not a single light works in this little cottage on the edge of Lakewood. As darkness falls, the rats, some with bodies half-a-foot long, come out to feed.
Night after night, Poldi crawled into bed as her protector and best friend in the world, 12-pound terrier Lexi, fended off the rodents, often barking for hours to keep them away.
This is the story of a proud, strong and independent woman. Raised in Oak Cliff, Poldi spent years working in New York City and taking solo vacations to Europe before returning here to care for her mother. She bought her own home in 1987 and for decades rode the bus to and from her IRS job in downtown Dallas.
This is also the story of a mentally fragile and isolated senior citizen for whom a deep rut of paranoia, not atypical of people who suffer from severe anxiety, has cut through her retirement years.
Since 2016, and perhaps even before that, Poldi began to lose many of the skills needed for daily living — to manage her finances, to take out her trash, to even leave her house.
Paramedics, nonprofits, neighbors and Adult Protective Services came and went, some genuinely there to help and some who just checked the box and moved on when confronted by Poldi’s obstinacy.
Her lifeline was the delivery service from nearby Piggy Pies Pizza, its cardboard boxes part of the strewn garbage that made walking through the house increasingly difficult. After eventually losing her cellphone and credit card in the growing mounds of rot — her checkbook and I.D. misplaced long before that — Poldi and Lexi went hungry.
The two would have died in this stench-filled house of horrors — if not for a woman even more stubborn than Poldi who showed up on her front porch July 19.
A few days earlier, Kelvisha Stokes, the most recent of a long line of Adult Protective Services caseworkers assigned to Poldi, had contacted Maria Stanley, with the Society of St. Vincent de Paul charity at St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church.
Kelvisha had a big ask: A rat extermination, estimated at $6,000, was needed at a house south of the church.
Although the Catholic charity couldn’t possibly shell out that kind of money, Kelvisha had stumbled onto just the person Poldi needed.
When Maria, along with fellow St. Vincent volunteer Chuck Stegman and Kelvisha were tentatively allowed into Poldi’s front room, the first thing they saw was a huge rat carcass.
Maria didn’t have to look much farther before she knew the dead rodent was hardly the worst of it. Her first thought was that Poldi and Lexi were going to die there, alone and invisible.
Nothing much fazes this Forest Hills mom, who spent years as a clinical gerontologist and social worker and is a veteran of Parkland Hospital, long-term care facilities and scores of home visits.
She’s dealt with a lot of bad cases. Poldi’s is one of the worst.
What often prevents shut-ins like Poldi from accepting help, Maria says, are questions and advice that make them feel they are no longer in charge. Instead, Maria asked, “What do you need? What can I do for you?”
What Poldi needed was reassurance that Lexi would be OK.
Any chance of getting Poldi to safety would require sufficiently winning her trust to first rescue a dog who had not been out of the house in years and whose hair was so overgrown and matted that she could barely see.
Miracles often start small. Maria brought hot meals once or twice a day. Chuck cleared and disinfected the refrigerator. Other St. Vincent volunteers handled countless behind-the-scenes tasks.
Their charity is not set up to do work this intensive, but it’s what Maria and others on the team knew must be done to save this woman’s life.
That first week Maria repeatedly turned her conversations with Poldi to the need to get Lexi to the vet to ensure she was OK.
Poldi finally said yes but was furious that Maria and Lexi were gone longer than promised. She lashed out with threats of “I can’t trust you and I’m gonna let you have it.”
But this time her anger failed to drive help away. “Let’s move on,” she recalled Maria saying. “Doesn’t Lexi look cute? Come inside and let’s eat.”
Lexi’s vet visit and the dog’s second outing, this time to Maria’s home, seemingly shook Poldi into acknowledging for the first time that perhaps she wasn’t managing on her own as well as she had thought.
When Maria suggested several days later that Lexi would be better off temporarily living with a Stanley family friend, Poldi haltingly agree that was probably best.
“I teared up a little bit,” she told me. “I’ve got feelings. When you’re single and alone like I’ve been, you learn to hide it.”
After one night without Lexi, Poldi was ready to leave too. She said she couldn’t face the rats alone, her first acknowledgement to Maria of the rodent infestation.
Maria knew she had to act fast. They headed to an extended-stay hotel, where Poldi got her first shower in longer than anyone knows and where I first met them a few days later.
Earlier that morning, I had visited Poldi’s Lakewood Heights home. It’s unconscionable to leave a human being in the conditions I saw through the windows and in the photos Maria sent me.
The Adult Protective Services caseworker told Maria that Poldi’s psychiatric assessment was done by phone and she was deemed competent. When I contacted Texas Family and Protective Services, its privacy policy prevented the release of any information to me.
“With all of our cases, we try to make sure the client is in a healthy and safe environment,” the response to my inquiry read. “But if they’re capable of making decisions on their own, they have the right to refuse services.”
Dallas Police Department records document at least 18 welfare checks to Poldi’s home in the last three years. Dallas Fire-Rescue responded to another 21 service calls.
Poldi told me the only person she trusted prior to Maria is Chris Williams, a Dallas Fire-Rescue paramedic. While she barred the door to many others, she let him check her vital signs and stay for a short visit.
“He seemed to have a sixth sense on when to come look in on me,” Poldi said.
Williams is a member of the department’s mobile outreach team and his visits — at least 15 since February — are in addition to the Fire-Rescue service calls.
He repeatedly showed up not just in his role as a paramedic but as a concerned citizen, and Poldi’s living conditions left him feeling almost helpless. “I was concerned about everything when it came to her,” he told me.
He had no choice but to respect her rights to refuse additional help, but “how do you allow something like this to happen? I’ve never seen a home in so much squalor.”
Just a few days of living outside of that noxious house has made a world of difference in Poldi. She’s sharp, intelligent and tells wonderful stories about her life in “old Dallas” and her family genealogy, all of them punctuated by loud laughter.
She especially delights in explaining the significance of her name, a shortened version of Leopoldina, which her mother chose in honor of the family’s Slovenian roots.
But a lot of holes remain in Poldi’s more recent memories, which she attributes partly to a fall she suffered at some recent unknown date that resulted in a hospital stay for a closed-head injury.
Occasionally, her emotions grow dark as she complains about one person or another who she says tried to steal her home or she tries to convince you that construction in a neighbor’s yard caused her rat problem.
Maria, already a busy mom with two teens in high school, understands the consequences of the bond she has established with this vulnerable senior citizen.
Poldi doesn’t have much use for doctors, but she needs their help. Her finances are decent but need sorting out. The future of the uninhabitable East Dallas property must be decided. She has long been estranged from her two siblings.
Lexi remains in temporary foster care and, the day we talked, Poldi said she’d be happy with a home where she and her dog could, at the least, visit regularly.
Like Poldi, Maria cries too, but hers are tears of anger.
“There have been a lot of people in and out of Poldi’s door, which is shocking to me,” Maria said as she turned to the older woman beside her and continued. “It’s clear that you needed some help. But you’d say ‘no’ and everyone disappeared.”
Maria’s message to Poldi is that she’s now safe. To the rest of us, she has this advice: When you come across your community’s next Poldi, don’t be pushy. But don’t check the box and walk away.
