Until yesterday morning, 50-year-old Eloisa Diaz led a quiet existence in D.C. She worked during the day as a domestic worker cleaning up after elderly residents. She kept a home on 11th Street NW in Columbia Heights for at least a year. She had no family, no close friends. Her neighbors, she says, she knew only well enough for a quick hello. But then Diaz’s life suddenly became very public — drawing the attention of a councilmember, the mayor’s office, and the D.C. Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency.

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At 9:30 a.m. on Tuesday, U.S. Marshals arrived at Diaz’s home to evict her. Once inside, they didn’t just find the diminutive woman and her lone tenant, they found boxes and boxes of her belongings. A lifelong pack rat, Diaz’s thrift store finds and flea market treasures had consumed the place from floor to ceiling, says one mover hired by the marshals. It took hours and dozens of men to cart her boxes to the curb.

By the end of the day, Diaz’s belongings stretched at least a city block — up and down 11th Street NW, and around the corner on Otis Place. In some spots, the boxes teetered at least 6 feet high, all of it cordoned off by yellow caution tape: ancient double-tape deck stereos, vacuum cleaners, dressers (including one with a Nelly Furtado sticker), end tables, mattresses, computer parts, VCRs, a foot massager, housewares, dozens of milk crates and trash bags stuffed with everything from clothes to a plastic flute, a 2007 Phillips Collection day planner, leather chairs, lamps, a portrait of a lamp, kitchen wares, and so on.

“This isn’t Dollar Store,” Diaz said. “You can go through it. This is amazing stuff.”

In one sense Diaz is right. Her sad trunk show brought out multiple city agencies. All were unsure how to handle the woman and her endless piles. Evictions are instant, miserable downsizings. Tenants generally do not stick around after the marshals have cleaned them out. They take what they can, leaving behind box springs, end tables, whatever won’t fit in a car load. Nancee Lyons, a spokesperson with the Department of Public Works, says tenants are allowed 72 hours to clear their belongings from the curb.

“As you know, most of the time, a lot of times people are out there picking through items. If the items become scattered, then we remove it immediately,” Lyons says. “The 72 hours is more of a courtesy. After that, we’ll collect it as trash.”

Lyons says that in Diaz’s case, DPW started removing items immediately because of the potential public safety hazard.

Diaz says she was no common hoarder, that she had merely been saving these items to send back to her relatives in Venezuela (where she’s from), Colombia, and Mexico. Two years ago, she says, she had a shipping container worth of stuff sent to relatives. But she says she lost her job after some of her clients either died or were put in nursing homes. She took on a tenant, but it wasn’t nearly enough to cover her $1,300 rent. In 2009, her landlord filed a case against her; court records show Diaz owed more than $9,000 in back rent.

Diaz didn’t have a car or friends to help her. And she refused to leave or part with a single end table or plastic flute.