Fifty-two-year-old Ernest Saunders III has seen the world from both its hollowing depths and soaring heights — literally and metaphorically. As a young boy, his biggest dream was to fly and cruise the skies with the Air Force. Today, Saunders is a FAA-certified remote pilot, sending his DJI Mavic Air 2 drone hundreds of feet into the air and watching New Haven from a bird’s eye view.
But the decades in between were not all blue skies and freedom calls from the top of skyscrapers. Born to a white mother and Black father in the 60s, Saunders was thrust into a world of only this or that and “never in between” the moment he opened his eyes. After his parents passed away when he was a teenager, Saunders found himself juggled between cities and family members who never fully accepted him.
“I just survived. And I survived. And nobody ever found me,” he said. “I had never really [had] a place to call home, and never had my own apartment until just a couple of years ago, until I was 48.”
He crashed on couches and slept in subway stations, watching as those around him left — wondering if they had given up on him. Holding back tears as his girlfriend died from cancer. Trying to recommunicate with a body that was sexually abused countless times by strangers, praying it would come back alive. Living paycheck to paycheck in a truck while working Dunkin’ Donuts and other small jobs.
Everything changed when a director at the Columbus House homeless shelter approached him one day with a detailed plan to get him into an apartment, asking if he would also be willing to consider therapy. It all started with a handshake and a hug, Saunders remembers, saying that at that point, he had been camping out at the shelter for two winters and two summers. Several sessions later, he was diagnosed with PTSD, OCD, Tourette’s Syndrome and bipolarity. It was a piece of news that he embraced with gratitude, however. Rather than beating himself up over his own psychological trauma, he accepted that the past was “unchangeable,” that the only thing he could do for himself was to “move forward” while keeping in mind his “history.”
“I started realizing that if I just gave myself a break and started to forgive myself, I [would] come out of that shell,” he said, showing off a fitness wristband that he uses to monitor his symptoms and heart rate. “I was able to come out of extreme isolation.”
It was “communication” — the “little skills like talking … [and being] inquisitive” — that saved his life. But this “strategy” doesn’t always work with everyone on the streets, he said, bringing up some fundamental problems with the way that the city addresses homelessness. Some people don’t want to be helped in the way that we think they want to be helped. Going up to a person on the streets with clipboards and a team of outreach officers, handcuffing them and running through a list of psychiatric medications is not addressing the core root of the problem, according to Saunders.
“And that’s trust,” he said. “The trust is so broken.”
For “unreachable” people who are on the verge of “giv[ing] up on themselves,” let alone on the external world, “you can barely lock eyes with them,” he described. “They are too emotionally distraught to make sense of what’s going on [at] that moment.”
The homeless are expected to react to help as if they had just met an “angel,” but there will always be people who “cocoon” themselves, who see imminent danger in those with the breadth of resources to help them, he said. To them, more resources can mean greater power to do harm.
Saunders suggests that instead of having the city install more security cameras or send in more police officers, sometimes the best thing that people can do is just sit down, listen and let the homeless speak for themselves. He urges the city to allocate land to create new parks and lots, to go up to people on the streets and hand them little slips of paper that read: “make this land your own” without saying much else. While the Green currently seems to serve as a “haven” for the homeless, Saunders said that the commercial nature of the intersection makes it difficult for people to relax and carry out recreational activities.
In spite of his own struggles, and of the visceral pain brought by seeing other homeless residents, he cannot help but tell himself on solo walks through Downtown that New Haven will always have a special place in his heart — out of all the different “cards” he has been dealt in life.
This moment marks the fourth time that Saunders has lived in the city, and one thing has never changed: the attitude of the people. The people here remind him of New York, a place where the folk are “just here together” and where people are as “multi-accepting” as they are “multicultural.” Today, he roams the cityscape with his drone, capturing everything from the fierce determination of community members at housing rallies to the frost-covered faces of the homeless men, women and children laying off the side of soccer fields and riverbeds. In the coming years, he hopes to start a drone-operating business to help out in local rescues and searches — and to buy a plot of land that he can call his very own. He then pointed to a dirt square on the Cross Campus sidewalk, saying that something even as small as that will make him happy. As he said that, the wind rocked the branches of a cherry blossom tree that grew from the square, flickering petals to the ground.
“I love cherry blossoms,” he said. “There’s still work to be done, but New Haven’s a miraculous place. Miraculous,” he said, watching as the sun peeked out from behind the clouds.
The rays of light stretching across campus that day looked a strange yellowish green, a color he said he had never seen before. He repeated the word “miraculous” several more times before getting up, heading toward Sterling Memorial Library. As Saunders flew his drone up and down — and left to right — above Cross Campus, local residents, students, children and tourists alike stopped to look. Innocent eyes and hushed faces looked up at this small machine as it waltzed and tangoed and whirred some more in the skies above — unaware that leading up to these towering heights was an incredible climb that this 52-year-old man had to endure for the majority of his life.
“I like to see people happy,” he said.
When he is not flying drones or editing pictures to bring out the “impact” in them, Saunders loves to continue his hunt for the best thin crust pizza in New Haven, a meal that he likes to finish with some ice cream from Ben & Jerry’s.