FIVE DAYS OF FRENZY

How Vickery Meadow dealt with its high-profile Ebola case and out-of-control media

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Hughes

Afew hours into the apartment 614 quarantine, the media maelstrom approached fever pitch.

They arrived in droves, even before police and health department officials showed up, say witnesses to the press’ descent on The Ivy Apartments in Vickery Meadow.

“The local guys, for the most part, were fine, but the national guys were horrendous,” says Rebecca Range, the executive director of the Vickery Meadow Improvement District.

They climbed fences, photographed crying women and children, and demanded answers from residents who did not understand what they were asking, Range says.

“It’s a big property — we had it closed off right away, but they were finding different ways in. You have to remember that most of the people at The Ivy don’t speak English. Eight different languages are spoken there. So you can imagine the chaos.”

Conrad High School student Se Da Oo Shay is fluent in “three and a half” languages and says he knows just about everyone at The Ivy. He spent that first afternoon, Sept. 28, doing everything he could think of to explain the situation, as it unfolded, to his neighbors.

“They all asked me, ‘What happened? What happened?’” he recalls. Over hammering helicopters and chattering reporters, he told them: “I said, ‘Ebola happened.’ ”

The Ivy residents call him Shay. They come to him with their problems.

“They have a broken faucet, they don’t tell the office. They tell me,” he says.

When Shay arrived home from school to police blockades, news vans and cameras, he hurried to the apartment manager’s office.

“I asked what’s going on, and they told me that Ebola was at The Ivy, and I was thinking, ‘What is Ebola?’ I Googled it,” he says. “At first I was very scared, and I worried that this would be someone I know, but then I learned it was a guy, Eric Duncan, who I did not know. And I could breathe.”

Duncan, the first person ever diagnosed with Ebola in the United States, reportedly traveled from Liberia to Dallas to marry Louise Troh, occupant of Ivy apartment 614.

The details are familiar by now: Duncan went to Presbyterian Hospital Sept. 25 but was soon discharged. Three days later, when he was violently ill, an ambulance transported him back to the hospital, where he tested positive for Ebola, an infectious virus that has killed more than 4,000 and counting in Africa. Duncan died eight days later.

Duncan’s diagnosis prompted a mandatory quarantine of Troh and three others inside Ivy unit 614.

Hoping to catch a glimpse of Troh and the others, hundreds of reporters armed with mics, cameras and blinding spotlights stalked the apartment, day and night.

The Ivy residents’ inexperience with both the English language and American media made for a special kind of chaos.

One group of residents said they must torch the apartment; it was how they dealt with contaminated properties in their country, says Shay. Others proposed vandalizing apartment 614 because they wanted the occupants and the media to leave.

This was the sort of irrational response Shay worked hard to prevent during the media siege, which lasted five days, until the quarantined were relocated.

“To an outsider it might have looked like the officials were really organized when it came to keeping people informed, but really it was Shay,” Range says, only halfway kidding.

Shay spent the better part of his life in a refugee camp near a war-impacted region of Thailand, he says with no hint of self-pity.

On an average afternoon, the teenager is dressed stylishly in a crisp white button-down, dark jeans and flip flops. His hair is spiky, his wristwatch techy. In the span of an hour he is interrupted several times by residents who need his help — eventually he excuses himself to help two visibly upset Burmese-speaking women report a crime.

Since he moved to The Ivy, it has been like this, he says. Through a refugee resettlement program, he and his 14-year-old brother moved to Dallas a few years ago to live with their grandparents. He speaks English, Burmese, Karen and some Thai. Of his own volition, he teaches English to anyone in the complex who wants to learn. Five nights a week, more than 30 people gather, sitting on the floor of a tiny apartment. He does his own homework while they work through exercises he’s given them.

“Without him, we are blind,” remarks one resident.

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