Lillian 'Sunshine' Wright: A diverse turnout for a colorful character

Sunshine, Chopsi or Lillian — no matter what name she was known by — everyone agrees she was a good neighbor. For 15 years, Lillian Ruth Wright, 69, lived a quiet life, camping behind a law office on West Franklin Street at night and chatting with friends, reading and soaking up sun in a nearby park during the day.

She had the means to get off the street — a few thousand dollars from her share of land leases on her native Lakota Sioux Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota, and Social Security — but she preferred a nomadic life. She felt free on the streets. She gave away her money to those she thought needed it more, and she often treated fellow street dwellers to breakfast, as she did the morning before she was killed, when she took a pal out for pancakes.

Office workers dressed in khakis and homeless denizens pushing shopping carts stood side by side as a member of Sunshine's tribe sang American Indian hymns and offered up ceremonial blessings. Sunshine's native and Christian beliefs were blended into the two-hour memorial with local clergy saying prayers, Pawnee musicians performing an honor song, Navajo Tony Redhouse playing a flute meditation and an American Indian group providing the drum music Sunshine loved.

"She was just a beautiful soul, a beautiful spirit," said Robert Lundquist, one of the lawyers who let Sunshine live behind their office. "She had such a joy of living. Joie de vivre — that's the phrase — if anybody embodied that spirit, it was Sunshine. She was bright, she was educated, she was very well-read, she had a great sense of humor. She made you feel glad to be alive."

Sunshine loved to laugh and enjoyed spinning tales — whether real or imagined — about her life.

"Sunshine just had this beautiful aura about her. There was something very welcoming about her. She was strong yet gentle," said city employee Laura Ward, who met Sunshine two years ago at El Presideo Plaza and organized the memorial.

Knowing how generous and sociable Sunshine was made it all the more shocking for office workers when they arrived to work June 12 and found her lying in a pool of blood on the back patio of the law office. Tucson police detectives have not released a cause of death or named a suspect, but according to a police report, a witness said she saw a bleeding man leaving the parking lot that morning.

"It was clearly a very violent death," said lawyer Larry Hecker, who knew Sunshine.

Sunshine's sister, Sylvia Konop of Alaska, didn't know her sister was homeless until she learned of her death. She'd visited Konop in Alaska in 1994, and the sisters had been in regular contact, but when Konop expressed an interest in visiting Tucson, Sunshine put her off.

"I'm shocked. To me, that isn't her," Konop said. "She's a person that really takes care of herself. She wants good things."

As a girl, Sunshine wanted to be a movie star, said Konop, who called her sister Chopsi — the Sioux word for "turtle" — a nickname given to her by the grandparents who raised the four Wright siblings in South Dakota after their parents divorced. Sunshine, her sister and two brothers attended boarding school. As teens, they were reunited with their father and lived on a farm for a while, then moved to Rapid City.

Sunshine married and moved to Tucson in her early 20s, her sister said. The marriage didn't last and in the early 1970s, Sunshine's ex-husband moved to California with their children, Konop said. Sunshine stayed here. She liked the warmth and later said the heat helped her arthritis. Through the years, she had little contact with her children.

In retrospect, Konop said, it makes sense that her sister opted for a life on the streets.

"I think that she did have Gypsy blood in her. She liked to move around. I don't think she liked to be tied down. I think she just wanted to be free."

Lundquist thought so, too. He would invite her to his home for family Thanksgivings and offer her a guest room when the weather turned cold. Sunshine looked after his daughter on occasion and house-sat for the family when they went on vacation. But she never stayed long.

"She was a free spirit and ... she loved being outside," Lundquist said. "She did not like a roof over her head."

Though she was estranged from her children, Sunshine was always eager to share photos of her grandchildren, who live in Oracle, Lundquist said. Hecker said his colleague's youngest daughter would sit with Sunshine and listen to her stories.

"She didn't ask for much. Generally she never took, she always asked," Hecker said, even getting permission for small things, such as plugging her electric blanket into an outside outlet during cold nights.

Sunshine enjoyed her vodka and had the occasional run-in with the law, but she wasn't a rabble-rouser, Lundquist said.

At the memorial, Lundquist spoke about his friend, offering a few words in Lakota that Sunshine taught him. And he drew laughter from the crowd when he reminisced about watching the movie "Dances With Wolves" with Sunshine as she pointed out all of the American Indian actors who, she claimed, were related to her.

Sunshine kept a low profile in the back of the law office. The only sign that Sunshine was sleeping there, Hecker said, was on weekends when she would hang her laundry on the fence to dry.

"In the last year she'd taken to planting flowers around the yard," Hecker said. "It was a mystery to us. These flowers would appear. It would just be one at a time and she was planting them."

As a Lakota Sioux, Sunshine could have been buried on the Rosebud Reservation, said friends at her memorial. But she wanted to stay close to the community that embraced her. Per her wishes, Sunshine will be cremated and her ashes scattered on Mount Lemmon.

More Life Stories

Kim Matas' series chronicles the lives of recently deceased Tucsonans.

Go to site

Kim Matas' blog

'Last Writes' is the sometimes serious, sometimes irreverent extension of the Life Stories series.

Go to blog