LOOKOUT Report: Maricopa HIV Deaths Reveal Gaps in Care for the Unhoused

It was an early January morning when Vanessa Thigpen was found dead near some railroad tracks at 44th Avenue and the I-10 Freeway.

The night before, she had found refuge in a tent with a friend — something she often did, according to investigatory reports. She had been living on the streets for a year since losing her home and was having difficulty finding a new place to live because she did not have any identification, according to police interviews.

The friend she stayed with the night before told investigators she was fine when he left the morning of Jan. 9. Later, a passerby noticed something was wrong: Thigpen was not breathing. Police arrived, and she was pronounced dead.

According to the autopsy, Thigpen died of complications from a methamphetamine overdose. But she also had an HIV diagnosis that exacerbated her health problems. It is unclear whether she was receiving treatment, but she became Maricopa County’s first death of 2025 with HIV listed as a contributing factor.

Two others have died since — one in hospice care, another in a detention facility — who have had HIV listed on their medical examiner records as a manner of death or contributing cause.

Going back five years, Thigpen is among more than a dozen unhoused people or those near homelessness who died with HIV listed as playing some part in their deaths. Less than a month before her death, Kamron Dashee died from inhaling the fungus that causes valley fever, but his advanced HIV — leading to AIDS — was also listed. He was found next to a Walgreens. A few months earlier, another unsheltered man died of heat exposure on the pavement outside a local business; his HIV status also was listed as a contributing factor.

Other cases are more cut-and-dry, with illnesses that — though unconfirmed — likely were made worse with an underlying HIV diagnosis, such as meningitis, pneumonia, and sepsis.

LOOKOUT reviewed medical examiner records, autopsy reports, preliminary investigatory reports, and toxicology reports and found that of the 54 deaths reviewed at the Maricopa County Medical Examiner’s Office between January 2020 and May 2025 in which HIV was a primary or contributing cause of death, nearly a quarter of the people who died struggled with housing — a figure not previously reported by local media.

Only three people were identified as dying directly from HIV or illnesses associated with the virus. And a handful of cases inside hospitals involved elderly patients who fell, hit their heads, and died of blunt force trauma. In those records, HIV was also listed as a contributing cause of death.

(Medical examiners list contributing causes of death — health factors that do not directly relate to someone’s manner of death — because a person’s death can be exacerbated by underlying health conditions. But for those living with HIV, illnesses or injuries of any sort, which are considered opportunistic infections, can worsen the ability to recover.)

The number of those who died with HIV listed on their reports highlights long-standing challenges in getting treatment to people living on the streets or those with difficulty finding permanent housing, and growing concerns among public health workers about federal funding shortfalls that threaten HIV and housing services for the most vulnerable.

Interviews conducted by LOOKOUT with public health experts and housing-sector workers — all of whom requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly and feared repercussions for their organizations — point to a systemic issue: HIV outreach efforts still overwhelmingly target gay men. Meanwhile, unhoused people or those experiencing housing insecurity — many navigating drug dependency and inconsistent access to medical care — are often left out of HIV-prevention and treatment strategies.

“This needs to be addressed on multiple fronts,” said one outreach worker with a Maricopa County medical provider. “This isn’t just a problem for gay men, and these deaths show it.”

It's true that men who have sex with men remain the most at-risk group in Arizona, with Black and Latino men disproportionately affected, according to state health data. But the state collects little information about how many unhoused people are living with HIV, obscuring the true scope of the problem. The limited data available is almost surely incomplete, researchers say. 

For example, this year Maricopa County reported that 147 of the 9,734 people in its point-in-time count self-disclosed as living with HIV.

As older Arizonans living with HIV grows, so does their isolation.

In 2023, 17% of all people diagnosed with HIV were over the age of 50. It’s both a concern and a realization for some that more should be done.

LOOKOUTFitzwilliam Anderson (he/him)

A more detailed 2024 Homelessness Management Information System report provided to LOOKOUT shows that of 54,000 unhoused people surveyed statewide, 565 self-disclosed an HIV diagnosis. Half were between ages 25 and 44. Eighteen were minors.

Public health workers say the actual number is almost certainly higher. Self-disclosure, they note, often leads to significant undercounts — especially for stigmatized health conditions like HIV.

At one outdoor shelter, 21 people are currently living with HIV, a city contractor overseeing the program said — a figure he has not seen in his 10 years working in supportive housing.

Most public health workers agree that getting people into care is complex and requires more than testing populations and driving them to pick up medication.

They argue the state needs to invest in housing-first strategies, which would place unhoused people — especially those most at risk — in government-funded housing with access to drug treatment, job-placement services, and direct medical care.

“It’s the evidence-based practice that we know works,” the contractor said.

Inside Arizona’s Unconventional Fight With HIV Rates

Arizona’s public health workers are replacing outdated clinic models with street-level outreach to reach people who might otherwise fall through the cracks.

LOOKOUTJoseph Darius Jaafari (he/him)

But those funds are at risk, currently. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development recently released a notice of funding opportunity that significantly cut grant funds for permanent housing. Funding for permanent housing currently is capped at 90% of rental costs. HUD had proposed reducing that funding cap to 30%.

Attorney General Kris Mayes, along with other state attorneys general, sued the Trump administration, arguing it violated the law by slashing congressionally appropriated funds. HUD rescinded the decision, saying the reversal would “allow the department to make appropriate revisions.”