Neighbors Force Closure of Home for AIDS Victims

In Oceanside, a plain-looking beige stucco house sits on a hillside in a quiet upper-middle-class neighborhood. It blends into the surroundings with such ease that one would never know its residents have drawn the attention of a homeowners’ association that has deemed them unsuitable neighbors.

Not that the eight residents, all of them suffering from the advanced stages of AIDS, are even aware of the controversy or of their impending eviction. Most of them are too far gone to notice.

But Ray Beierle, founder of the home known as Fraternity House, has taken notice.

“Everybody laughs and says, ‘What are you gonna do now, Ray?’ ” said the 66-year-old war veteran and former nurse. “I say, ‘Hey, you can’t keep this old man down. I’m gonna give ‘em a run for their money as long as I can. What have I got to lose?’ ”

Though the Henie Hills Homeowners Assn. has asked for their ouster and the owner of the house has refused to renew the lease, which expires Jan. 1, Beierle is not going to pack his bags and disappear.

Over the weekend, he opened a new rented home for North County people with AIDS, taking four of Fraternity House’s current residents with him.

Beierle says he has learned from his mistakes and anticipates no problems in the new house.

The new facility will not be affiliated with Fraternity House and will be called simply “Ray Beierle’s House.” The semi-rural location of the seven-bedroom home is a secret but, he says, “it makes this house look like Skid Row.”

Patients to Move

The board of directors of Fraternity House plans to relocate the remaining patients and continue business as usual after they are forced out of the Valley Road house, board chairman Gary Lewis said.

The board of directors has hired a replacement for Beierle, who will oversee the waning days of the house on Valley Road and will move with Fraternity House to a new location. Beginning today, Violet Osborn, 59, will be paid $2,000 a month to manage Fraternity House, with the help of newly hired assistant manager Douglas Millsap.

Osborn spent 18 years on the board of directors of the Muscular Dystrophy Assn. of San Diego, but says her real education in life-threatening illnesses began a little over a year ago when her son was diagnosed with AIDS. “I think all of us have to really be aware of what’s happening to our young people,” Osborn said Sunday as she was looking around Fraternity House and preparing for her new job. “There’s such a need here . . . I felt I had to do something of a positive nature.”

“As soon as I saw the house and met the people working here, and saw the caring . . . It’s everything I would want my son to experience,” she said.

A recent afternoon last week while Beierle was still in charge found most of the residents asleep, as they often are. Two of the more mobile residents watched television game shows in the den, and one sat on the back porch enjoying the cool breeze riffling through citrus trees in the yard, while golfers played the El Camino Country Club course next door.

The interior of the house is as quiet as the outside, and the only immediate clues that it is not just any suburban residence are the wheelchairs stored under the stairway and the visiting-hours sign posted in the front hallway. Watercolor paintings by the residents adorn the walls and Buffy, a friendly cocker spaniel, greets visitors.

Buffy also oversees the farewells.

“She goes from room to room and if somebody is close to dying, she goes and lays close to them,” Beierle said.

Held Various Jobs

Beierle, a widower, once managed a motel, worked in real estate, then bought a citrus ranch in Texas to retire on. But a cold snap turned his fruit into “$4,000 worth of frozen Popsicles” and ruined his retirement plans.

He turned to nursing to make a living and said the experience of working for a home nursing company in Escondido moved him to help AIDS patients.

“I kept being sent out to these patients and seeing them die in the circumstances they did,” he said. “I thought if there was anything I could do to make it easier for them, I would.

“This is my career now. I enjoy it, I like it, I feel I need it and, without being a braggart, I feel I can do it better than anyone else.”

There are four private shelters in San Diego County that house AIDS patients, but Fraternity House is the only one in North County. It is also the only one that takes people who are very close to death.

“We get them only when they can no longer take care of themselves,” Beierle said. “This is the last stop.”

Vigils Discouraged

Beierle works with the families of the residents but discourages relatives from keeping 24-hour vigils at patients’ bedsides.

“I tell everybody when it’s time to die, this is something we have to do by ourselves. There’s no need to go to the hospital unless they are suffering in pain and have to go there to be made comfortable,” he said.

“The actual leaving is like being born in reverse. If there’s no unusual problem, we just let them go quietly and lovingly.”

Beierle freely admits that he knew he was breaking the neighborhood rules, which call for a single family in each house. When he initially rented the house from a San Diego doctor, he said, he intended to live there with only his two sons and one AIDS patient named Don.

“I just figured, ‘What the hell, I might as well have more people and make it an AIDS home.’ ”

As the population of the five-bedroom house gradually increased, Beierle gave up his master bedroom to house three more people. Financial troubles set in, so Fraternity House was incorporated as a nonprofit charitable organization and a 12-member board of directors was elected in January.

To date, 37 people with AIDS have passed through the doors. Some of them have improved to the point where they have been able to move back to their homes. Most have died.

Beat the Odds

Beierle figures he beat the odds by successfully running an AIDS shelter for nearly two years right under the noses of the watchful neighbors. After all, there is nothing really noticeable about the house to announce its purpose.

Except, there was that one time when an addled resident wandered out of the house in his backless hospital gown and into a neighbor’s garage. Then, there was the other confused man who hiked down the hill to spontaneously join a meeting of corporate executives at the country club.

But the immediate neighbors, even the ones who had figured it out, didn’t really seem to mind those things, he said.

Beierle figures his cover was blown in September, 1988, when he publicly advertised the fact that he was looking for another home to expand the operation. His plea drew a fair amount of attention from the media, not to mention the neighbors and the state Department of Health Services.

In May, the county Health Services Department served Beierle with a cease-and-desist order because it determined that he was running a nursing home without a license and without the required round-the-clock medical care for the patients.

Beierle countered that the home was nothing more than a residence for AIDS sufferers, not a medical facility. The problem eventually was solved by having each occupant sign a rent-sharing agreement, and pay $500 a month for rent, meals and laundry service. The nursing, cooking and cleaning help, provided by the county In-Home Support Services program, is paid for from each resident’s individual Social Security or medical coverage.

The order was later rescinded when the department determined that the home was not technically a medical facility.

Complaint Filed

But then a complaint was filed by an anonymous neighbor, and the Henie Hills Homeowners’ Assn. ruled that a business or institution had no place in the neighborhood.

“They are in full violation of our codes, covenants and restrictions,” said Ted Lohrey, treasurer of the association. “It has nothing to do with the people there. We’re not looking at it because they’re AIDS patients and we want them out. You just can’t have medical facilities, institutions or any type of business here, and that’s exactly what it is.

“Mr. Beierle knew he was against the rules. . . . He basically doesn’t care about anything else but his business,” Lohrey continued. “Presumably, he’s making a profit off of this. I don’t think he’s just doing this out of the goodness of his heart.”

Ambulances and trucks carrying infectious waste routinely drive through the neighborhood, creating a general nuisance, he said. The board sent a notice to the house’s owner requesting that the business cease immediately, Lohrey said, not in January when the lease expires. If the business continues to operate, the board may fine the homeowner and put a lien on the house if he refuses to pay, he said.

“We don’t want to be the bad guys,” Lohrey said. “We don’t want gay rights groups and AIDS patients coming up here picketing our neighborhood and threatening our board of directors. . . . We just want them to follow the rules of our neighborhood like everybody else.”

Plan to Move on Jan. 1

Lewis, a clinical psychologist who works with AIDS patients, said the board of directors of Fraternity House has no plans to move the residents before Jan. 1, unless they find another home before then. Lewis said it was his understanding that attorneys for both sides had agreed that simply allowing the lease to lapse would be sufficient.

Disputing Lohrey’s contention that profit was being made on the operation, Lewis said, “We’re more than happy to provide any kind of budget reports. . . . In general, we’ve been running about $5,000 a month in the hole.” Lewis said the facility is run entirely on private donations and that fund-raisers usually help fill the gaps. Though each resident is asked to pay about $500 a month to cover his own rent and expenses, in reality they pay only what they can afford and some pay nothing at all, Lewis said.

The other AIDS homes in the county include the Truax House, named after the late gay activist Dr. Brad Truax and run by the AIDS Assistance Fund; the Joshua House run by the Catholic Diocese, and the Methodist Church’s Ariel House. All three are in downtown San Diego and house only people who are still mobile and able to care for themselves.

Our House, also run by the AIDS Assistance Fund, closed recently because the organization couldn’t afford to provide the full-time nurse required by the state Department of Health Services.

“As far as I know, that’s about it. It’s a really desperate situation,” said Tom Ball, a San Diego AIDS Project volunteer. “It’s not basically very easy to get into a nursing home. . . . They’re not very happy to accept people who are HIV-positive. I’ve had people walk in here who have AIDS and don’t know where to go.

“Even those who have families, sometimes it’s too much for them to take care of the person with AIDS,” Ball said. “For the majority of people who are on their own, there seems to be a real need for some kind of place like Fraternity House, for people who can’t take care of themselves.”