On a cold March morning, Suzanne Elaine McKinney, a 63-year-old attorney, hid behind trash bags and space-blanket curtains — crammed in the driver’s seat of her home, a coffin-tight Mitsubishi Eclipse. The aging yellow sports car was decorated with frayed bumper stickers — Wax Trax, Tattered Cover and “Wild Women Don’t Get the Blues.”
There was also a note scrawled on college-ruled notebook paper: Please do not tow.
Two dozen feet away, Washington Park neighbors huddled together to discuss McKinney and her car. Not wanting McKinney to hear them, they spoke in hushed voices about how to force her to move from their neighborhood. They wanted her off the private patch of concrete she was borrowing behind her friend Terry Berkeley’s house.
Where to? Maybe back to Marion Parkway, where McKinney had spent the past decade in her car. Or a Denver hotel homeless shelter. Or her old Quaker meeting house.
Anywhere but here.
