By Cindy Ellen Russell, Star-Bulletin
This woman, known as Majesty to some and Queenie to others,
was among those who were told they could no longer stay at
Honolulu Airport. Social workers, police and airport management
made a sweep of the facilities at the airport last night -- the first
night after a new policy took effect -- to remove the homeless.

A ‘gentle’ airport ouster
fails to placate all
of its homeless

Workers and officers rout the
little crowd who regularly
bed down there

By Lori Tighe
Star-Bulletin

Majesty laid back on the cement bus-stop bench outside Delta ticketing at Honolulu Airport just after midnight this morning. She tied her mouth shut with rope so nobody would steal her teeth. She squeezed her eyes closed and shook her head slightly, trying to fall asleep.

It had been a distressing night. She had fled from TV cameras and from reporters. She resisted police and social workers who tried to convince her to go to a shelter.

They told Majesty she had to leave because of new restricted hours designed to rid the airport of the homeless. She made it as far as the public bus stop, still on airport grounds but outside the roped-off terminals. She needed to wait for her husband, who abandoned her several years ago after giving her a one-way ticket to Honolulu.

It was the airport's first night with the new policy. Most of the 46 homeless, who had been counted sleeping in the airport earlier in the week, had left. Most of the half-dozen remaining are severely mentally ill, said Deborah Smith, a social worker with the Institute for Human Services.

"I think it's going as well as can be expected," said Smith, zigzagging from one homeless person to another. IHS took three homeless airport people to shelters by midnight, and police arrested one ranting man on a warrant for contempt of court.

"Since it needs to be done, they're doing it in a gentle, gentle way," Smith said. "The problem with the mentally ill: This is their home. They see no reason to leave. They're in a different world."

Majesty doesn't want to leave the airport because she still waits for her husband, said Ellen Gong, a homeless woman who looks out for the other homeless. Majesty's husband bought her a ticket to Honolulu and told her he would meet her there, Gong said. Only the ticket was one-way and he never came.

"I see her, she'll be looking around the airport, seeing if he came off a flight," Gong said.

In Majesty's discarded items, Douglas Hocking, the airport duty manager, found a one-way ticket from St. Paul, Minn., carefully wrapped up, along with receipts for tiaras she wears from costume stores. She occasionally wears a sash. She likes to drape herself with numerous shell necklaces and adorns her hair with flowers, he said. Airport people such as Hocking call her Queenie, social workers call her Majesty, and police know her as Kaiserin Majesty, 57.

"It's so hard," Hocking said. He watched Majesty sit at her throne, a bench with a sculpture inside the terminal, surrounded by social workers trying to coax her to a shelter. "They build a rapport. Then when they ask her 'What are you going to do?' she shuts down. Some days she'll talk to you and others she won't."

Hocking said that even Officer Theodore Goo, the only policeman she will talk to, tried to convince her to go. "He's really good with her. He talks past her head, so she doesn't feel intimidated."

"I feel for them," Goo said, looking off in her direction. He had had to arrest her six months ago.