No one else was going to drive Kendra Tate’s toy Jaguar. It sat unused in her apartment, gathering dust, near to her clothes, her school uniform, and a dozen other toys, the birthright of any child with as many aunties as she had. There it remained, through a hot September into a mild February.
And then it burned. In a field out in the country, piled high with her shoes, with her clothes, her mother Deshundra’s mixed in. It made for a quiet bonfire, with only family to witness it. But it had to happen. They could not bear the thought of their outfits, stripped down and handed out piecemeal, appearing throughout the town of Cleveland, Mississippi, little ambushes of grief in a grieving process continually disrupted.
Kendra was 5. Her mother, Deshundra, had just turned 32. The gas leak that cut their lives short had come and gone from the news while her Jaguar lay untouched in the room where she died. Around the modest apartment just outside Cleveland, residents evacuated after their deaths had already returned, already adjusted to normalcy in their homes.
The Millennia Companies, the corporation that owned their apartment complex, was under investigation, accused of mismanagement, neglect and fraud, the deaths of Deshundra and Kendra just one story within a nationwide campaign of resistance against the conditions facing Millennia tenants.
But the Tate family held their tongues. They pulled together, mourned as best as they could, in fits and starts, and adjusted to a loss beyond comprehension, to the vanishing of two generations in a single day. Their loved ones were spoken of—eulogized in media coverage, listed among other victims from other disasters—but not spoken for. Four years have passed since their deaths. Sitting in the home of their mother and grandmother, Brenda Tate, it feels that time has done little to blunt the edge of grief. Now, at long last, the Tate family wants to talk. Mostly, they want to talk about Deshundra and Kendra.
Years Without Justice
August 30, 2022, was the last day of Deshundra and Kendra Tate’s lives. They passed on a hot, humid day, victims of gas poisoning at Sunset Village, a federally subsidized apartment complex just outside Cleveland, Mississippi.
Only a day before, Deshundra had taken Kendra to the hospital for what the family says doctors assumed was RSV, which can cause children to lose consciousness or become unresponsive. They went home that night to an apartment that was in the midst of a dangerous gas leak. They had already complained to management about the smell of gas at their apartment, but as residents explained, most maintenance requests at Sunset Village went unanswered.
The next day, family members concerned about not hearing from Deshundra rushed to her apartment. And there she and Kendra were.
Their deaths were the catalyst for an earthquake across the small Delta community. Police evacuated the apartment complex, home to almost 100 families across multiple buildings. Their uprooted lives continued across a handful of motels in the city proper. Months dragged on, as food rotted in fridges and families split apart—as the consequences of countless homes in catastrophic disrepair spilled out across the town.
Months became years. The tragedy at Sunset Village was one of the first in a chain reaction of horrors at apartment complexes across the nation, owned and operated by Millennia Housing Management, Ltd. In 2019, a gas explosion at Calloway Cove in Jacksonville, Florida, hospitalized seven, including children, with severe burns. In October 2022, only a month after the death of Deshundra and Kendra, a fatal fire at the Shorter College Garden Apartments in North Little Rock, Arkansas killed three. Another deadly fire in Kentucky that same December. The utter collapse of conditions at a complex in Atlanta, displacing hundreds.
The litigation following these events, three fatal, six involving habitability, coalesced into an avalanche of liability that may now far exceed the coverage of Millennia’s insurers, AXIS Surplus Insurance Company and Mercer Insurance Company. Now, the companies have filed an interpleader, in essence, a request for a federal court in Ohio, where Millennia is based, to take the nigh-impossible task of dividing up the remaining insurance payout to a multitude of families.
All this time, the Tate family has waited, delayed in part by a legal challenge over Kendra’s inheritance. In 2024, Millennia was debarred, the Department of Housing and Urban Development stripping the company of its ability to acquire more Section 8 properties, a preventative that did little to assuage the Tate family.
Four years have passed since the deaths of Deshundra and Kendra Tate. If justice is coming, justice in full, or justice parceled into bits by the arcane workings of the judicial system, it has yet to arrive for the Tates.
Strong Women
Some are dealt a life without a strong woman in their corner. Deshundra Tate had no fewer than five. Her mother Brenda, three aunts—Patricia, Angela, and Sharon—and a grandmother, Juanita. There are no duplicates in the Tate family. Patricia has an uncommon poise and elegance, while Angela has an unmistakable fearlessness and force of will. Sharon possesses a quiet, thoughtful contemplation. And Brenda, sweet Brenda, has the kind of gentle warmth that can only come from immense love transmuted into deep grief. Juanita, gone now for 25 years, looms large in the family tree, the portrait of a matriarch rendered in faded memorials and old stories.
But Deshundra and Kendra are stories now too. “Kendra was a house baby,” Patricia said, gathered around the table in Brenda’s home. “She belonged to everybody.” They spoke of Deshundra’s time in the Coahoma Community College choir, with the Youth Ministry at the New Kingdom Missionary Baptist Church in Cleveland, and then Vernon Memorial Apostolic Church, giving speeches at Easter and singing in the choir with a clarity and a strength that others could admire, but not match.
Their lives spilled out onto Brenda’s kitchen table, contained in photographs and school reports, the two of them mixed in with family, on bicycles, on school trips. “My epilogue,” the first page read.
Deshundra Tate was born on August 22, 1990. To the Tate family, she was Dee Dee. She was a Girl Scout Brownie, and as a little girl she dreamed of being a nurse or a lawyer. She was quick with a joke, skilled at impersonating the big personalities of her aunts. And she was kind.
Brenda could describe Kendra in a word: spitfire. She was active, said Patricia, and energetic. Always outside, always posing for the camera. True to their word, there are few photos of Kendra in the same outfit. “Whatever Kendra wanted to have,” Angela said, “she’d always try to find it.” And with three aunts doting over her, no day passed without love. “She was only here for a short time,” Patricia said. “But she had her impact.”
For all of them, summer has become the hardest season. Kendra’s birthday is in July, Deshundra’s in August. And then the day they lost them soon behind.
“I just remember them on those days. Those days are special to me,” Brenda said.
Even in the years after their death, little things—like the presence of back to school sales—would catch them unawares.
“There’s no supplies to buy. You know, you’re looking at the store, she’s gonna need this, she’s gonna need that,” Patricia said. “What do you buy now?”
“The bond is broken,” Angela said. “There’s missing links to that chain. You can’t get it back.” Kendra grows up with them in spite of her passing, with each year, they see children that would have been her age, and they think of what she’d have been like.
No Solace
All of the women in the Tate family remember those two days in August four years ago, every moment of how they responded. They cycled in and out of the emergency room with Deshundra the night before, fretting over Kendra, who had passed out and revived before arriving at the hospital. Concluding her episode had been caused by sickness, the hospital discharged her late at night, the last moment her family saw her.
The next day, Patricia expected to hear from Deshundra by 3 p.m. sharp. By the time a medical appointment ended at 5 p.m., no call had arrived. She called Angela, who rushed to Sunset Village. No neighbors had seen Deshundra that day. She wasn’t answering knocks at the door. Angela picked up Sharon, who helped her look.
They scoured the complex until they found a maintenance worker, who pulled the air conditioner out of the window and climbed through. He came out the front door, raised his arm up, and pointed mutely into the home.
In the months that followed, it occurred to some in the community that this tragedy had been uncovered only by the attentive concern of Deshundra’s aunts. Any amount of time could have passed had Deshundra and her daughter been left alone. And with the deadly gas fire at another Millennia property in North Little Rock, Arkansas, coming so soon after the deaths in Mississippi, the consequences of a delay could have been unimaginable.
How is that for solace? The idea, reflected back to Deshundra’s aunts and mother in the early days of their grief, that their love for their babies had saved the lives of others—that in dying Deshundra and Kendra had delivered others from death.
To the family, hypotheticals are far from comfort. “You think I give a damn how many lives they saved?” Angela said. As though, on balance, the loss could be made whole. “You’re trying to tell somebody that lost two family members that—and I try to grasp the concept—” she said, Patricia cutting in.
“The intention is good. But it’s not a comfort to you,” she said.
Insurance Issues
Almost immediately after the death of Deshundra and Kendra, Kendra’s father filed a lawsuit against Sunset Village. Not long after, courts appointed Brenda the proper administrator of the estate—finding Kendra’s father had denied paternity and been manifestly uninvolved in his daughter’s life. But it took until 2025 for the Mississippi Court of Appeals to unanimously concur with that opinion, and only this year did the final appeal fall apart.
As time passed, countless other claims against Millennia passed through the court system. Twelve lawsuits, with well over 100 individual claimants, all proceeding through the legal system. Some were the family members of deceased tenants. Some alleged personal harm, in ways large and small, from Millennia’s stewardship of its many properties.
Millennia, for its part, has strenuously and repeatedly denied allegations of negligence, in the Sunset Village deaths and elsewhere, arguing that it had purchased “highly distressed” properties from Global Ministries Foundation, on which it has continued to make repairs.
Upon the company’s debarment, a marketing firm representing Millennia announced that it would be “selling the majority of its affordable multifamily housing properties,” while at the same time “addressing all issues raised by HUD.”
Millennia did not respond to requests for comment on this story, but previous responses from Millennia to the Mississippi Free Press can be found here and here.
In early 2025, a lawsuit emerging from the deaths at Millennia’s property in Kentucky concluded with a $1,525,000 settlement, exhausting the primary insurance available for the incident and eating into the secondary pools provided by AXIS and Mercer.
In the interpleader, AXIS and Mercer argue that the massive burden of so many claims against Millennia exceed the available coverage in a shared pool of funds. James River, a third company, and the first layer of insurance available to Millennia, has a strict limit of $1 million per incident, a pool that may have to be shared among all of those the Sunset Village gas leak affected.
In the simplest terms, if the interpleader is accepted, AXIS and Mercer will deposit just under $4.5 million to the court, which may then have to suffice as the available insurance for many of Millennia’s various lawsuits across the country, leaving victims to fight for an increasingly small pie.
That is not to suggest that Millennia’s potential liability ends with its insurance policy. The lawsuit over the deaths of Deshundra and Kendra has yet to truly begin, nor have all of the other deaths and displacements had their full day in court.
‘I Have to Pray’
The same family that came together to find Deshundra and Kendra that day years ago comes together still. They gather in Brenda’s home, cooking and reminiscing and grieving two lives cut short.
It had been some time since any of them looked at the photo albums of Deshundra and Kendra. But the experience brings more smiles than tears. That was true of them both, in life and in death.
Brenda says prayer keeps her going. “ I have to pray,” she said. “I have to talk to God. Because it’s bigger than me. And I have to ask him for strength and courage because this is more than me, you know? And even though I have to continue on, the grief is there, but the remembrance is there too. So I have to pray.”
Psalm 91 is a comfort. Patricia can recite it by heart. “He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most high, shall abide under the shadow of the almighty,” she said. “I will say of the lord, he is my refuge and my fortress: my god; in him will I trust.”
For Deshundra herself, nothing was more of a comfort than her favorite gospel song, Rev. Timothy Wright’s “Trouble Don’t Last Always.”
What the Tates want more than anything is the one thing they cannot have: Deshundra and Kendra back in their lives, their baby and her baby. Whatever else is available to them is mere consolation. Accountability, justice from anyone responsible for their loss, for one. But also the knowledge—the hope—that Deshundra and Kendra will be remembered as more than just a moment of tragedy, that their light will outlast the trouble.
Former MFP Reporter Shaunicy Muhammad contributed to this story.
The Mississippi Free Press’ initial coverage of Sunset Village was produced with assistance from the Center for Health Journalism at the University of Southern California as part of the 2022 National Fellowship at the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism.
Follow the Mississippi Free Press’ coverage of housing and read past stories here.
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