Willia Lee says when she first started getting severe headaches and brief losses of vision, doctors told her it was just an emotional reaction to deaths in her family and other stresses.

Eventually, a neurosurgeon determined that she suffered from pseudotumor cerebri, a buildup of fluid in the brain. Lee had a shunt installed in her head to drain fluids off her brain, and it remains there today. By that time, though, pressure on her optic nerve from the pseudotumor had left her blind in one eye and with tunnel vision in the other.

In 2006, Lee went on disability, and for the last two years she and her four children, ages 4 to 18, have lived in a one-story house on Webster Street, a nice place where her rent is paid largely by Section 8 administered by the Fort Wayne Housing Authority.

The list of regulations that govern the housing authority is 600 pages long, but complying with all those rules is really pretty simple: Tell the truth about your income, pay your share of the rent on time and behave yourself.

Lee, though, had had problems with her oldest son. When he was young he’d run away. He suffered from mental health issues and left school, she said. He got in with the wrong crowd, people a lot older than him, and when he turned 18, she says, he told her he didn’t have to listen to her any more. He ridiculed her for constantly quoting from the Bible, she says.

Finally, Lee says, sometime before Thanksgiving, she told her son he had to live by her rules or leave. Her son, she says, moved in with his girlfriend.

Last week, Lee, wearing sunglasses and holding a red and white cane in a darkened living room with pictures of Jesus on the walls, sat on the sofa next to her sleeping 4-year-old son and quietly cried. Maybe if she hadn’t kicked her son out, things would be different. Or maybe not.

On Dec. 28, her son, Vincent, and some cohorts allegedly tried to rob a Dollar General store in Leo-Cedarville. Vincent got caught and ended up in jail. He gave police his mother’s address as his home.

Later, Willia Lee, who says she didn’t even know her son had been arrested, went to the housing authority and asked to have Vincent Lee’s name removed from her lease as an occupant of her home. Don’t worry, she says she was told, you’ll be getting a letter soon.

And a letter, dated Jan. 9, did come, telling her that in 30 days she would be terminated from the Section 8 program. The reason: A resident in her home, Vincent Lee, had engaged in violent criminal behavior.

Lee says it’s devastating. “I raised him not to be that kind of child,” Lee said. Now, she says, she feels shame and humiliation when she goes to church and meets people she knows, and she wonders what will happen to her home, to the rest of her children, and herself.

“It’s a tremendous weight,” Lee says. “I’m wondering where my babies are going to live because of what an 18-year-old did.” She doesn’t have the money to move and rent an apartment on her own, she says.

The policy of terminating people from the Section 8 program for criminal behavior, called a one-strike rule, was instituted under the Clinton administration because criminal activity was rampant in subsidized housing, said Maynard Scales, executive director of the housing authority.

The rule is harsh, but most people have no problem with the policy, which essentially says the government isn’t going to pay the rent for drug dealers or other criminals.

Criminal terminations in Fort Wayne are uncommon, though, Scales said. Something more than 20 people a month are terminated from the Section 8 program, mostly because they have moved out of state or found jobs that make them financially ineligible. Only about 5 percent of terminations are the result of criminal behavior.

Lee can appeal the termination order, and she is doing so with the assistance of the League for the Blind and Disabled. According to the housing authority’s rules, an exception can be made if the person involved in the illegal behavior has left the household, but simply saying the person has moved isn’t enough. There must be proof that they are living elsewhere.

Even if Lee’s appeal is successful, though, it means her son could not even visit her at her home or she could face termination again.

It’s a sad situation all around, a disabled blind woman and her children, as young as 4 years old, at risk of ending up on the street, victims of the criminal behavior of a family member.