Posted on 03/31/2007 7:09:31 PM PDT by Muentzer2005
Southampton, N.Y. — THE blind man died alone in front of his television in a lounge chair, near a table covered with medicine bottles wrapped in rubber bands and a cereal box stuffed with mail. Each rubber band marked a prescription he recognized by touch. Each envelope contained information he could not read. He never received letters, only bills.
A neighbor called police after she noticed a pipe had burst at his house. His double-door garage was cloaked in a frozen waterfall. Police discovered the man inside, still as the icy water. His television still buzzing, his living room blanketed with dead flies. His electric bills had gone unpaid, but the company for some inexplicable reason had not shut off power. Warm air had preserved his face almost perfectly, like a dried rose.
They found him 13 months after his final breath ...
A few days later, Kelly told her mother about a poem someone had anonymously posted about him online:
Vincenzo Ricardo lived all alone
Diabetic, and blind — left all on his own.
For a year, no one saw him
For a year no one cared
So a man sat dead, while his TV blared….
Out of sight, out of mind,
As the days moved forward
Just a crabby old man
Whom the neighbors ignored….
He was just an old man
Who needed a friend,
No one deserves
This lonely an end.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Bit of poetic waxing, eh?
Wax and buff.
I wonder why a blind man would sit in front of a television? He must have had some vision. The circumstances of his death do sound pitiful and sad, but there are worse ways to go.
A very sad and vivid image.
There is one conclusion from this: The guy was a jerk. He died like that because he had no friends and no family. That is not random. I'll bet that basically, for most of his life, he was a jerk and treated people like garbage.
Why did people used to sit in front of the radio? It was probably like radio to him.
About me they'll say eaten by his cats.
We used to help this blind man by taking pet food to him. He always had the TV on. I would always ask "What ya watchin?" and he would always answer "Nuthin" and then he'd laugh like crazy.
Who paid the power bill? I call BS on this story..
"We used to help this blind man by taking pet food to him."
Blind and lousy taste buds too, that's sad.
I can't say, myself, since I don't recall black and white television broadcasts, let alone pre-tv radio days. I'd have to guess that people sat close by because the signal wasn't so great, in order to hear it better.
I gotta ask.......Did he have pets?
Great neighbors!
The guy across the street took off for a little vacation, and the police were up here questioning all the neighbors. I thought he said afterwards he notified the post office or told the mailman, but maybe it was a different mailman who got alarmed. He was and is fine.
My daughter saved a neighbor's life when she fell, broke her hip (I think) and was like that for about three days. She loved the lady (she had helped us a lot during a crisis in my life) and went to visit her, noticed the mail had accumulated. Her son was a minister of a big church here. They put her in a nursing home after that. I went to visit her in the nursing home a couple times along with another lady, and she was able to walk again. I took her some cookies like she had given me from time to time, and another patient walked right in the room and grabbed one off the plate. The neighbor did have Alzheimer's or senility to the point she only remembered her husband, think she didn't know me, but she was still as polite and kind like she had always been.
Another neighbor was a lawyer and had a drinking problem. His wife became mentally ill, he got help for his problem and divorced her, went to mass every day. They had a nice house and a nice life. She was on the streets and sent to a home for the mentally ill, was there for several years. Finally, she gets well enough to be on her own, her daughter is old enough to help her, and she was doing ok last I knew. He died in a nice apartment building, and they did not find his body for three days.
Well, he kept his sense of humor. That had to be a plus for him.
Heart breaking story. The woman who cared for him is an angel.
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