Tommy Sablan never knows who’s on the other end when he picks up the phone at work. As the long-time producer of the “Jeff and Jer Showgram” on STAR 100.7-FM, it’s his job to shag listeners’ calls. And on that Thursday in late January 1999, when the on-air topic was relationships, he was looking for the “tight and bright” — entertaining but serious.

Until Becky called.

Becky’s boyfriend was beating her and she was afraid for her life. Crying but composed, she told her story first to Sablan, who sits in a studio separated by windows from the on-air team. Because her boyfriend was gone for the weekend, she said, she had three days to seek shelter. But she had nowhere to go.

“She said she didn’t need to go on the air, but she needed help,” he remembers. Something in her story broke through the show’s usual tone of chaotic humor. Sablan dubbed her “Becky,” and insisted Jeff and Jer take her call.

Becky told her story in hair-raising detail to on-air partners Jeff Elliott and Jerry St. James, and the show stopped in its tracks.

“We talked with her on the air for an hour,” recalls Elliott. “It wasn’t an interview, it was just a conversation and it didn’t feel like a radio show.” Commercials were delayed until Becky herself needed to take a break, he recalls.

Becky’s phone call kicked off a chain of events that changed her life, and those of dozens of other local battered women. First the station’s 36 phone lines lit up after Elliott and St. James figured that $5,000 could set Becky up in an apartment and buy her some breathing room to restart her life. STAR listeners pledged that amount before the morning’s show was over, Sablan says. Becky herself spent that afternoon at Sablan’s Rancho Penasquitos home, and by the next day was in the care of a domestic violence counselor from the San Diego Police Department.

Back at STAR, it was dawning on Sablan, Elliott, St. James and the rest of the staff that Becky was just one of hundreds — maybe thousands — of women in San Diego under siege in their own homes from violent partners, and that it was a widespread, urgent community problem.

As the donations mounted — $50,000 by the morning after Becky’s first call — the morning show trio knew it had something big on its hands.

Other San Diegans heard Becky’s call that day, among them Tiffany Sherer, then an aide to City Councilwoman Barbara Warden.

“I listen to Jeff and Jer all the time while I’m getting ready for work and I was following Becky’s story like everyone else,” Warden says. “One day they said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if one day we were standing at the door of a shelter named Becky's House?’”

Warden, Sherer’s boss, was two years from the end of her council term and looking for worthy projects on which to bestow a nest egg of nearly $1 million in federal Community Development Block Grants. Sherer passed on Becky’s story and Warden began to listen to the updates, which had become a regular feature of the STAR morning show. Before long, she went on the air with Jeff and Jer to announce her support for a shelter-related project.

“As I was driving back Downtown and listening to the show, I heard all these people calling in to donate paint, furniture, decorating services — all kinds of work and talent,” remembers Warden, now president of the Downtown San Diego Partnership. “I thought to myself, ‘This is great. This is why I ran for office.’”

Becky’s desperate search for refuge had ignited a community campaign. “I will never forget those days,” STAR’s Sablan says now. “The entire station worked as a team. We had no meetings and no plans. We did everything on the air.”

At Warden’s urging, the STAR team sought professional advice on how best to leverage the station’s growing resources for the most urgent needs of battered women. The YWCA’s Judy Case DiPasquale and the San Diego Domestic Violence Council were contacted. The team learned that the most urgent need was not emergency shelter but transitional housing — safe havens where women and their children could go after their crisis was over to build new lives.

The concept of Becky’s House was born. With donated or low-cost land, Warden’s pledge of block grant funds would nearly cover the estimated $1.4 million needed to build a transitional shelter for 10 families.

“Jeff and Jer raised the additional $400,000,” says Case DiPasquale, “along with hundreds of vendors contributing materials and fund-raising by so many of their listeners.” For example, she says, when Warden went back on the air with Elliott and St. James to announce that the project needed lumber for framing and finishing, “Steve Redfern called up and said the Viejas Band would sign a blank purchase order for all the lumber we needed.”

Architect Tim Golba was another listener following Becky’s story. “I heard Becky’s original call and was completely captivated by her,” he says. “Her fear and trauma were so evident in her voice.”

After hearing the shelter idea and discussing it with his staff, Golba decided to contribute his firm’s architectural talents. But STAR’s phone lines were so jammed with contributors he couldn’t get through. “So we faxed something in and within five minutes Tommy Sablan called us and said they’d love to have an architect.”

After securing a piece of city-owned land, Golba’s team met with the YWCA and Case DiPasquale to discuss how to make Becky’s House as secure yet homelike as possible. “We didn’t want women curled up in little shanties,” he recalls. “We didn’t need a Taj Mahal, but if the house isn’t nicer than their previous situation, they might consider going back.”

So the units of Becky’s House were designed with homey touches such as window seats and knickknack shelves. “They also have front porches, which are the architectural symbols of a home,” Golba says.

Warden brought in a longtime friend, contractor Doug Barnhart, whose corporate headquarters was located in her council district. “He wrote a bid for $788,000, which had no profit for him,” Warden says. “He did it as a labor of love.”

Barnhart explains his interest in Becky’s House by recalling his work in the oilfields of West Texas during his college years at Texas Tech. “These were very hard, dirty jobs working on oil rigs. I was just passing through on my way to an engineering degree. But I saw a lot of families for whom it was permanent life.

“There were families that were just” — he pauses for words — “not all together. I’d see it and wonder about it, but at that age you are just moving on.” Still, he says, “those kinds of life experiences motivate you later in one direction or another.” He adds, “I am the employer of 300-something people, and I see the impact that families can have on a person’s performance.”

Becky’s compelling story, along with Warden’s and STAR’s relentless advocacy, drew in City Attorney Casey Gwinn. An anti-violence campaigner since his earliest days as a deputy city attorney, Gwinn contributed legal support and public relations to the campaign. “Housing is the biggest issue we have with domestic violence,” he says. “Emergency shelter is important, but the greatest need is for housing when the crisis phase is over. We need, quite literally, hundreds of transitional units for domestic violence victims.”

Like Barnhart, Gwinn also has been marked by personal experience. “I was assigned domestic violence cases to prosecute in 1985,” he says. “At the time I had no particular background in it. I just had the naive understanding that there shouldn’t be violence in relationships. After I’d been prosecuting these cases for eight years I found out my grandfather had abused my grandmother.”

Gwinn’s passion grew alongside his expertise, to the point where he now consults with jurisdictions across the United States and Canada on domestic violence.

The Becky’s House groundbreaking was less than one year after Becky’s original call — Dec. 10, 1999. The 10-unit complex was filled by sundown on the day it opened, two years to the day from Becky’s first call.

It’s currently home to nine families with 25 kids — none of whom will ever have to make an emergency call to Tommy Sablan.

—Joanne Gribble