Timeline

It would have been easier to assemble a specific timeline a year ago, but at the time my mother died we assumed that this was a weird fluke, not a policy which killed people every year. We were taking care of the logistics and grieving, not planning to go public.

My brother has many of our mother’s records, including some downloaded from her APS account. Between those and our memory, we have been trying to figure things out. I may update this page as I piece things together.

The electric bill

We know our mother had the money to pay her electric bill. All of her other bills were paid up. We believe that she thought the bank’s autopay was covering her bills, but it wasn’t, so she did not realize that she was so far past due. It explains why she did not reach out to anyone for help.

• We know she had autopay set up in May 2023 because a bill shows that her autopay payment failed.

• Evidently this prevented automatic payments after that. Bills in August — December show mounting past due payments. In January 2024, she got caught up with a payment of about $1,100

• Autopay still wasn’t working, so past due bills started piling up again

• The first bill indicating a shut-off warning is dated 23 April; it’s not clear whether she received it on paper.

• APS has said publicly that they tried to contact her “10 times through email, phone, a physical door hanger and monthly bills”. I don’t doubt that, though my brother and I did not notice any of those going through our mother’s things.

• Her APS account shows two phone numbers for her with 202 and 703 area codes. She moved to Arizona from Washington DC, so those are old numbers she must have used when first getting set up. She used a cellphone with an Arizona 623 area code, so any phone calls they made must not have reached her.

• The first bill indicating a shut-off warning is dated 23 April; it’s not clear whether she received it on paper.

• We do know about some emails from APS, which my brother is pretty sure our mother had not opened when he got into her email last year:

  • 30 April — notifying her about her 23 April bill and the first email that says “Past Due”

  • 8 May — the email is the first “Disconnect Notice” and it also mentions that “we left a notice at your place of residence”

  • 9 May — says “Final Notice”

  • 14 May — the day after the shutoff - “Please pay your past-due balance of $423.18 to have your service turned back on”

• They cut off her power on 13 May, with 18 days to spare before regulations would prevent them from cutting her off during the summer.

• The cost to reconnect her power when my brother & I arrived was $586. I had it in my memory that this included some reconnect fees, but my brother thinks otherwise. I’ll clarify if we get more information.

Her death

APS cut off the power on 13 May, when the high in Phoenix was 93°F. I’m pretty sure it had been a couple of weeks since I had spoken to her, which was only a little unusual; we were erratic correspondents, with times when we would talk every day or three, then drop out of touch for a few weeks.

The temperature climbed to 99°F on the 14th. We would not find her dead until 19 May, and the Medical Examiner’s report does not speculate about her actual date of death. In retrospect it seems very likely that she died in the first day; heat kills fast and catches people by surprise.

I spent the week of the 13th-17th on a very consuming work trip.

On the 17th, a neighbor who had a key visited my mother’s house, was surprised that she did not answer the doorbell, noticed that the weekly newspaper delivered on the 16th was still on the porch, and used her key to go in. She did not see my mother, which would make things very mysterious for a long moment; it turned out that she had fallen into an odd, hidden position when she died.

Midday on the 19th, I got a message from a friend of hers that my mother missed their usual weekly breakfast. I wound up devoting the rest of the day to detective work:

• I tracked down the neighbor with a key to my mother’s house and learned about her visit on the 17th.

• I dispatched the Sun City Posse for a wellness check. They met up with the friend with a key, followed their policy of not going into the house, but the friend did and again did not find my mother. The Posse reported the house smelling like cigarettes but not Dead Person.

• I escalated to contacting the proper Sheriff and issued a Missing Persons. They entered her house late that evening and did find her.