ROANOKE, Va. – Getting to know Chris Bonner is a success story for community resource officers Briana Dickerson and Jacob Underwood.
“If it wasn’t for you guys, I promise you I would not be here,” Bonner said, reflecting on the support he received from the officers.
A few weeks earlier, Dickerson and Underwood met Bonner while conducting outreach through the Roanoke Police Department’s new STAR Initiative, which stands for Supporting Transition Assistance and Recovery. This program aims to address the challenges faced by individuals experiencing homelessness in the community.
When someone calls 911 about a homeless encampment or someone sleeping or trespassing on city property, Underwood and Dickerson often hear the same questions.
“In a housing crisis, it’s really hard,” Underwood said. “A challenge that me and Bri face all the time is, ‘Well, Officer Underwood, Officer Dickerson, where do I go? Bri, Jacob, if I can’t be here, where can I go?‘”
‘If I can’t go to the pavilion, if I can’t be in the median, where can I go?‘" Underwood recalled of the questions he’s asked by those experiencing homelessness.
Dickerson added, “At the end of the day, it may not be a police problem, right? But it lands on the police to solve the problem. And we encounter, who do we call at two or three o’clock in the morning when the service providers may close?”
The police department was tasked with issuing vacate orders for reported encampments on city property. Dickerson and Underwood faced numerous challenges as they sought to connect people to services.
Underwood and Dickerson said that they didn’t want to just shuffle the problem to another part of the city, so they recruited others to help and launched the STAR Initiative in January.
The initiative includes multiple service providers in the city, including Blue Ridge Behavioral Healthcare, BrightView, the HOPE Initiative with Bradley Free Clinic, Dawn Sandoval with The Least of These Ministry (TLOT) and the City of Roanoke Homeless Assistance Team. Together, they go out into the field every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon to respond to encampments and connect people to services. 10 News tagged along with the officers to see their work firsthand.
“In creating this initiative, it was really wanting to meet people where they are, understand them, and truly hear their stories and then connect them to the services out in the field,” Dickerson explained. “Instead of expecting them to navigate a resource-rich community and it still be complex.”
You’ve probably noticed someone holding a sign asking for money at many major street corners in the Roanoke Valley. According to the annual Point-in-Time Count results, homelessness in the Roanoke region jumped 20.4% from 2023 to 2024. This year’s count will not be released until May.
While it may seem that homelessness is growing exponentially, Underwood says it has become more visible due to dwindling resources.
“Places like the Ramada Inn, that was a low-income housing for some,” said Underwood. “When you get rid of that, it creates that disturbance in the routine where now everyone thinks that it’s actually an uptick in unsheltered and homelessness, when it’s actually because we took away a resource.”
After a stop at the cemetery behind the Rescue Mission, Underwood made a call, and we went to meet Bonner.
Bonner says he wasn’t always homeless. The Las Vegas native moved to Roanoke to help his mom when she was diagnosed with cancer.
“They were saying she had almost six months to live,” Bonner said. “We changed her diet. She started doing exercise and all this stuff, eating better. And literally she went from that—now it’s been six years. She’s still alive, but she has dementia.”
What started as a mission to care for his mother, turned into an emotional crisis for Bonner.
“She literally started saying things and doing things that were traumatic to me, as far as, with my wife being murdered—and she was pregnant at the time. So the things that my mother was saying made it so I literally could not handle what she was saying," Bonner said.
He says that’s ultimately what drove him out in November, without a place to stay. But before he left, he made sure his mom would be okay.
“We called her insurance company and now she’s got around-the-clock care and all that. But I wanted to stay close to her, and I came out to get a job. But then that’s when I found out: ID’s expired, from another state, I didn’t have a birth certificate, didn’t have my Social Security card,” said Bonner. “I was out here in the winter with a, I just had a pair of pajamas and a sweatshirt—that’s it.”
Not being from the area, Bonner says he went two weeks without eating because didn’t even know where to get food—until he was introduced to community resources and met two people who would change everything, officers Briana Dickerson and Jacob Underwood.
“You guys literally changed my life in a matter of weeks,” said Bonner.
After losing almost all hope, he says his future is finally looking up. He was gifted a bicycle after telling the officers he needed one to get to and from resources in the city.
“You guys did your part, I did my part, and everything like clockwork: got my birth certificate, got my Social Security [card], I just got my driver’s license on Monday,” said Bonner.
And more than anything, he says he’s grateful that Officers Dickerson and Underwood saw him as a person—not just as someone who was homeless.
When asked what would need to change to better help people experiencing homelessness, Officer Dickerson offered perspective:
“That is a great question. And I don’t know that I have an answer for that,” said Dickerson. “This is a big, complex thing, right? And I think, on a smaller scale, what we are doing—as Officer Underwood and I from the police department and then partnering with our agency providers—is just making small impacts and moving the needle as best as we can to help people with the services that they need to get connected to.”
She added, “A lot of us are one traumatic event and one paycheck away from being in the same circumstance.”
