Kansas City mother gets news of homeless daughter’s death in fire in devastating way

It had been six days since Barbara Mehagan of Kansas City had last spoken to her daughter, before the fire broke out.

Elizabeth Marie Lindsey was 28, homeless, the eldest of three with a joyous and kind heart, but she also suffered mental illness. There had barely been a day since Liz, or Izzy as her friends on the street called her, left their Gladstone home a decade before that Mehagan had not worried about her safety.

“I begged and begged and begged her to get off the streets,” Mehagan told The Star Wednesday. “And, actually, those were my last words for her.” They had spoken by cellphone.

“My last words to her,” Mehagan said, her voice choking with emotions, “was, ‘Please, Liz, get off the streets.”

Around 6 a.m. on Jan. 13, motorists on Interstate 70 alerted police and firefighters to a fierce blaze that had erupted beneath the overpass near Indiana Avenue.

Four and a half hours later, around 10:30 a.m that Thursday, Mehagan was at her desk at North Kansas City Hospital, where she does clerical work in the human resources department. She had just bought Liz a new cell phone in October, urging her to keep it with her at all times, although not thinking how difficult it would be for her daughter to keep it charged on the street or in the cold.

The phone buzzed. Mehagan checked the caller.

“I was thinking, ‘Oh, it’s Liz. I’ll call her on my lunch break,’” Mehagan said, “you know, because it gets busy. No big deal. I talk to her a lot. Then, the next thing you know, I get a text message.”

It was from Liz’s phone, but it wasn’t Liz. It was from Billy, one of Liz’s closest friends on the street. The message was brief.

“It says, ‘I’m sorry to tell you this. This is Billy, Liz’s BFF. Liz passed away in a fire this morning.”

“I just looked at my coworker,” Mehagan recounted. “And I said, ‘I gotta go! I gotta go!’ And she goes, ‘What’s the matter?’ And I said, ‘Liz is dead!”

Unsure what to do, she decided to stay. From work, she called the Kansas City police. In time, she reached a main investigator.

“He was really super sweet,” she said. “He laid it all out for me, what happened, what he could tell me. I was at work, talking to the police, calling the medical examiner.”

By then it was 2 p.m.

“I was thinking to myself,’ Mehagan said, “‘Oh, my god, my son is at home.’ He’s 17, Liz’s brother. I was like, ‘I don’t want Christian finding out about this on the internet,’ because people were already posting on Facebook.”

She went home.

“With my husband, I told my son.”

Since then, Mehagan said, she and the family — Christian; Liz’s married sister Amie Homan; her step-dad, David Mehagan, who raised Liz from the time she was in first grade — have been trying to stay strong.

“I have my moments,” Mehagan said. “I actually got her ashes today.”

The plan is for a celebration of life sometimes in May, Mehagan said, “because she was such a happy, joyful, bright type of person. I don’t want all the dark and gloom.” Their hope is to purchase a bench and dedicate it to what she knows to be “the beauty of my baby” in Gladstone’s Oak Grove Park, a place she loved.

Since Lindsey’s name was publicly released by police on Tuesday, those who knew her have praised her as a bright and happy spirit always willing to help others, even volunteering to help other houseless individuals living on the streets.

“She was always really bright and cheery,” said Alina Heart, who knew Lindsey for two years as a worker for Creative Innovative Entrepreneurs, an outreach group. “Even though she had her own struggles, she brought so much joy and warmth. She was very loving.”

Self-pity was not in her nature, said Sharon Ward, program director of Care Beyond the Boulevard, an organization that brings medical help to those experiencing houselessness.

“From the moment I met Izzy you would not think she had a care in the world,” Ward said. “She didn’t want to blame somebody else for her situation. She just always accepted it and just lived to the fullest of what she had available to her.”

That Lindsey had troubles was certain, her mother said. They began early, with a diagnosis of hypothyroidism and growth hormone deficiency. She had mental and learning difficulties.

“She wasn’t mentally disabled, as far as being slow or anything like that,” Mehagan said. “She just thought on a different level than other individuals, almost childlike. She was very mature in a lot of ways, too. She wanted to always do things her own way.”

She attended North Kansas City’s Winnetonka High School, had normal teenage years, her mother said, until she reached about her sophomore year. “She was just rebellious,” she said. By 17, Lindsey wanted to make her own choices.

“When she became a teen, she kind of left the house,” Mehagan said. “I kept asking her to come back. She was like, ‘No, I’m going to be with my friends.’ Since then she’s just been on this roller coaster.”

She would come home; she would leave. “I helped her furnish probably four houses,” said Mehagan, who also believes that, on many levels, her daughter was failed by the systems that were supposed to help her.

“Even from the time that she was a child,” her mother continued. “They really just kind of pushed her through school. She had mental health issues. I tried to offer to get her help. I signed her up for Medicaid, and she would always get rejected. I tried. She got on food stamps. She could never get the help that she needed.”

She tried to become a certified nursing assistant, but school remained hard and it didn’t last. As a young adult, she became pregnant. She had a son. She would later lose custody of him after a 2016 accusation of child abuse.

“She was accused, but it wasn’t her that abused him,” Mehagan said, pointing to a boyfriend at the time. Authorities, she said, instead blamed her daughter.

“She had mental disabilities. They made her, like, ‘It’s OK, it’s OK. You can say you abused him.’ She believed them. She lost her son.”

The child was later adopted. Mehagan said she still maintains contact.

For more than a decade, Mehagan said, she feared for her daughter’s safety because of the violence that can come with living on the streets. In the back of her mind, she feared getting a call one day saying that her daughter was seriously hurt, or worse.

If there is any solace in the tragedy, Mehagan said, it is her belief that her daughter didn’t suffer, and that she succumbed to carbon monoxide before the flames. “God interceded in this,” she believes and took care of her girl.

“She’s in heaven,” Mehagan said. “So, you know, she’s not freezing out in this cold. It gives me peace to know that she’s not freezing now.”

The Star’s Anna Spoerre contributed to this report.