Lighting the path so you can take action
Rincon Country RV Resorts on the southwest side of Tucson is surrounded by gently rolling hills populated with saguaros. On the highest hill stands a small church with a white cross. small home builders
On the last day of June 2023, Norman Butka, a resident of the community, was found dead in a shed next to his home. The temperature was 105 degrees.
The next month, on July 12, Charles Jerabek, staying in an RV near Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, was found dead amid low lying mesquite and scrubby palo verde trees. Heat contributed to his death, according to medical examiner records.
Less than a week later, on July 19 — with the temperature hitting 112 degrees — Valentina Galtsova was found dead inside her mobile home just south of Three Points. A sandy road with rolling hills leads to the address where Galtsova was found: a wire fence surrounding a plot with a red-roofed house with a metal windchime swaying in the wind and two red chairs empty out front.
Two days later on July 21, three more people in Pima County — Peggy Murphy, John Flowers, and Robyn Antone — were found dead in or just outside their mobile homes. The temperature that day was 110.
Five more people living in mobile homes or RVs were found dead that July — Linda Martynack, George Hoffman, Mary Padgett, Andres Flores and Melody Westerman.
The medical examiner’s determination of what contributed to the death in each case: environmental heat exposure.
Arizona Luminaria requested and analyzed heat-related or heat-contributed death data provided by the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner to gain an understanding of the lethal impacts of heat on mobile home residents.
This map shows the distribution of heat-related deaths in and outside of mobile homes and RVs in Pima County from May 2023 to September 2024 using publicly available data from the medical examiner’s office. Each address includes the name of the person who died, the day they were found and the high temperature.
Between May 2023 and September 2024 — basically two summers — heat caused or contributed to 114 deaths that took place indoors during that time period. Of those, 30% were in mobile homes or RVs.
Meanwhile, mobile homes make up about 10% percent of all housing in the Pima County area, according to a 2019 analysis from the University of Arizona.
An analysis of the medical examiner data found that mobile home heat deaths count for a disproportionate number of total heat deaths in the county.
It’s a stark reminder of the ways residents of mobile homes and RVs are uniquely vulnerable to heat, and the ways that indoor heat deaths in particular happen outside the public eye.
“When someone’s home floods, your neighbors can tell. When its roof has been blown off by wind, when it’s been destroyed by fire, you can tell,” said University of Arizona professor Mark Kear, who studies environmental vulnerability in mobile homes. “But when you are suffering to a point when you are dying, no one can tell, your home looks exactly the same.”
Mobile homes built after 1976 are referred to as manufactured homes. They are often made of thin metal walls that heat up quickly, particularly if the structure is old or dilapidated.
This analysis looked at mobile homes and RVs together because they are both often built of materials vulnerable to extreme heat, are sometimes kept in the same parks, and the people who live in them experience similar financial vulnerabilities.
Tucson shattered heat records multiple times last year, according to the National Weather Service. The year before, in 2023, there were 126 heat-related deaths in Southern Arizona, more than any other year on record. There was a slight drop in heat-related deaths in 2024 — for a total of at least 95 — but the number is still over three times more than any year going back to 2010.
Despite these concerns, mobile homes, especially for the poor and elderly, fill an essential housing need. A double-wide mobile home in a senior park can connect you with a group of neighbors at a similar stage in life; a mobile home park near your daughter’s school takes out the stress of the school bus. Most importantly, a mobile home is often the only affordable place to call your own. Mary Alice Theroux poses for a photo outside her mobile home on Tucson’s north side on Jan. 24, 2025. Photo by Michael McKisson.Recognizing the threat
Mary Alice Theroux, an organizer and mobile home park resident in north Tucson, moved into a mobile home because it was an affordable option amidst her family’s long struggle with medical bills. With both her husband and sons struggling with a genetic kidney condition, her family paid out of pocket for the medical care including transplants, which left little money for housing. Get Arizona Luminaria's weekly email Sign up
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“People that live in mobile homes are all kinds of people,” said Theroux. “All it takes is one tragedy in someone’s family to render their finances where they need to downsize, and mobile homes are the perfect option.”
Kear, from the University of Arizona, said there are four times the number of manufactured housing units as there are subsidized housing units in Pima County. “That profoundly indicates the shortage of affordable housing we have,” he told Arizona Luminaria.
According to Kear’s analysis, 100,000 residents in greater Tucson live in manufactured homes.
Manufactured housing can be an enticing option despite the climate challenges in Tucson. In general, newer units can be very energy efficient, said Kear. But in reality, the most affordable units for low-income families or seniors on fixed incomes also tend to be in poor physical condition, exacerbating difficulties with heating and cooling, and in parks with poor upkeep.
Kear said heat deaths are only one part of the way people in mobile homes may suffer in the heat. “For every person that dies, there are probably hundreds of other hospital visits or people suffering in silence in the private space of their home.”
While there is no single, clear way to stop excess deaths in mobile home communities, he said the issue could be addressed by modernizing older mobile homes that are harder to cool, offering utility payment assistance more broadly and making sure that park residents can choose what kind of cooling system they have.
“It’s harder for manufactured housing residents to get loans to make improvements to their homes, it’s harder for manufactured housing residents to get utility assistance,” he said. “Doing nothing to address these barriers is irresponsible and inhumane.”
He added: “There is no excuse not to act.” Pima County Medical Examiner Gregory Hess looks through files at the Medical Examiner headquarters on Jan. 24, 2025. Photo by Michael McKisson.Environmental heat exposure
When investigators with the Pima County Medical Examiner’s office visit a site where someone died and they suspect heat may have been a factor, they may do a few different things in their investigation. If the person died at home, they’ll check whether the air conditioner is on. If they’re outside, they will check the temperature of their body. They may also check for evidence of dehydration with electrolyte testing.
Then they write their takeaway for how heat impacted an individual’s death: environmental heat exposure as an immediate cause of death or contributing to a death.
It’s an imperfect art because of the way heat impacts the body, says Pima County Medical Examiner Gregory Hess. “It is inherently harder than a lot of other types of deaths that we certify,” he told Arizona Luminaria.
Despite the inexact science, whether or not heat was a factor in the death has been included in Pima County medical examiner death data since 2023, helping government leaders, policy makers, and journalists understand some of the costs of desert heat on vulnerable populations.
The Pima County model is based on the medical examiner’s office in Maricopa County, which is years into its battle with ever-growing extreme summer temperatures. In 2018, Maricopa gave the option to its investigators on scene to share more information in their reports about what they were observing with heat deaths.
Still, it doesn’t tell the whole story of how heat impacts death.
Hess said there remain a lot of unknowns about how heat kills, pointing to the presence of certain drugs, to the risks of nights where the temperature doesn’t drop — what’s known as “high lows” — or the sustained number of days with high temperatures.
“Where is it that you start to see bad things happen, and when should people start to pay attention? I don’t think anybody knows yet,” said Hess. “But I do think in ten years of looking at this data, those are the kind of questions you should be able to have a better opinion about.”
Another difficulty in understanding the scope and cause of the problem is that not all deaths in Pima County are certified by the medical examiner — only those in which there is not a clear and accidental cause. In most cases, a private physician will certify a death.
But someone who doesn’t have a doctor or is found by a law enforcement officer on a safety check, will have their death reviewed by the medical examiner’s office.
That means the medical examiner’s office certifies around 20% of deaths in the county, said Hess. In other words, a lot of heat deaths in the county may be uncounted. An aerial image of the Prince of Tucson RV Park where a resident died from a heat-related issue. The RV park is located near I-10 and Prince Road. Photo by Michael McKisson on Jan. 24, 2025.A north-side mobile home was the site of a heat-related death. Photo on Jan. 24, 2025 by Michael McKisson. A midtown mobile home was the site of a heat-related death. Photo on Jan. 24, 2025 by Michael McKisson. Paul Dacon’s mobile home where he died in July 2024. Photo by Michael McKisson.Advocates want a new system of support
The challenges people face while living in mobile homes are not just structural.
Some mobile home residents also have to contend with dilapidated park infrastructure that means it may take longer to fix electricity or water issues. In the case of one park on the north side of Tucson — called Hummingbird Harvest — a 30-second power outage on the electric utility’s side lasted 11-days. During that period, a resident died, and his home was found without electricity or air conditioning.
Some mobile home residents receive their utilities through a “master meter” system, where the landlord or park manager is the customer of the utility, and subdivides a main bill based on customer meter readings. Under that system, individual residents are not eligible for most low-income utility assistance because they don’t have a direct contract with a utility provider.
Tucson Electric Power serves more than 200 master meter mobile home communities in its service territory.
And in cases when they want to dispute a charge, residents have few key legal recourses. At the same time, it’s often costly and in some cases impossible to move mobile homes, giving residents few options to relocate if they enter a dispute with their park owners.
For Mary Alice Theroux, more resources to repair mobile homes is key. She also wants to make sure there is oversight of park owners and landlords in how they treat residents, a dynamic it is more complicated to legislate around, she says.
“It’s a big step, but we also need park owners to be held accountable.” Mary Alice Theroux looks through documents she saved during her work with ASU’s mobile home heat study on Jan. 24, 2025. Photo by Michael McKisson.
In recent years, a robust coalition of organizations, including the Arizona Association of Manufactured Home and RV Owners, the advocacy group Wildfire AZ, individual residents and researchers at both Arizona State University and the University of Arizona have intensified their organizing and advocacy for mobile home residents.
Those efforts helped change the law to mitigate the impact of extreme heat on people in mobile homes by barring landlords from restricting certain kinds of air conditioners or cooling devices on mobile homes because they are noisy or ugly.
Localities have also begun addressing heat impacts more broadly; those efforts often encompass mobile home residents even if they aren’t explicitly named.
In 2024, Pima County and the city of Tucson established plans for the first time to respond to the crisis of extreme heat.
Tucson’s heat roadmap identifies the need to help residents better cool their homes and aims to support heat resilience in low-income communities, say city officials. A recent policy change to the homeowner rehabilitation program, which helps low-income homeowners with repairs, could help mobile home owners install air conditioning systems and better insulate their homes, according to city officials.
The Pima County Health Department also has a new office to address the health impacts of climate, called the Office of Climate and Environmental Health Justice. The county and city both work with volunteer groups and nonprofits to do canvassing in vulnerable areas. That focus includes senior home parks, said Julie Robinson, the program officer of the new office.
Tucson has also received funding that directly addresses the need for investment in mobile homes.
In 2021, the Tucson mayor and city council announced a federal grant to help adopt a new project, the Housing Affordability Strategy for Tucson.
In the announcement for the new program, Tucson Mayor Regina Romero said, “Manufactured housing is the single-most affordable type of housing available in Tucson.” She also noted that “Tucson is one of the fastest warming cities in the country” and stressed the importance of “rehabilitating aging manufactured housing.”
Three years later, in December 2024, the City of Tucson won a competitive $11.5 million federal grant to invest in manufactured housing, which includes mobile homes, to help residents purchase mobile home parks for communal ownership, rehabilitate homes and provide eviction assistance.
At the press conference announcing the grant, Romero got choked up explaining that she herself had grown up in a manufactured home. “It is absolutely hot in the summer, absolutely cold in the winter,” she said.
“Tucson has one of the biggest populations of manufactured housing in the Southwest,” Romero said. She added that while people living in mobile homes are sometimes “looked down upon,” they deserve the investment.
As our climate continues to heat up, experts say the number of people at risk of heat deaths will continue to climb.
Over the last two years in Pima County, at least 19% of deaths in which heat was a cause or related factor took place in or outside of a mobile home or RV, a total of 37 people dying in or near their mobile homes or RVs.
Many of those deaths lasted into the fall. Last year, which also saw the hottest October day in Tucson’s history, heat caused or contributed to the death of four people that same month: Alejandro Garcia, Dean Hardin, James Brown, and Victor Rodriguez-Leal.
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by Yana Kunichoff and John Washington, AZ Luminaria February 17, 2025
Yana Kunichoff is a reporter, documentary producer and Report For America corps member based in Tucson. She covers community resilience in Southern Arizona. Previously, she covered education for The Arizona... More by Yana Kunichoff
John Washington covers Tucson, Pima County, criminal justice and the environment for Arizona Luminaria. His investigative reporting series on deaths at the Pima County jail won an INN award in 2023. Before... More by John Washington
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.