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Column: Readers come to aid of Navy veteran living in uninhabitable home in Gary: ‘If no one cares, he will die, alone and in squalor’

Shelia Mitchell-Erb knocked on the front door. No one answered.

“I’m not giving up,” she told me.

Mitchell-Erb is a clinical social worker at Jesse Brown VA Medical Center in Chicago. Part of her job is to develop the trust of homeless military veterans who need housing assistance or medical services.

“I’m not going to be happy until I get this man to leave this home for at least a medical physical,” she said.

My June 22 column profiled the elderly U.S. Navy veteran who’s living in a home that’s dangerously uninhabitable, according to his neighbors. The 77-year-old man lives in the Miller section of Gary. His property is overrun with weeds, trash, and neglect.

“Inside his home, it’s the worst you can imagine,” a female neighbor said. “He has no running water. There are holes in his roof. He’s a hoarder. He has live animals in there. Maybe some of them are dead. Bags of human and animal feces.”

I visited his home late last month. I knocked on doors and windows. I yelled to him from outside, asking what I could do to help him. He didn’t respond. A few readers also volunteered to help him. They also knocked on his door. He didn’t crack it open.

“He needs help desperately. He’s gonna die in squalor. I don’t know what else to say,” the neighbor said.

After visiting his home, Mitchell-Erb has called the man multiple times. They spoke on the phone three times, the last call for 30 minutes. It gave her hope.

“He has his own way. I’m trying not to push him too much,” she said.

She told him that she’s a veteran, too.

“We have to look out for each other,” she said.

He has cracked open his trust for a stranger, it seems.

Mitchell-Erb, who lives in Highland, offered to take him grocery shopping near his home. She offered him a Walmart gift card. It piqued his interest. He typically calls for a taxi to take him to a store late at night. But it’s not reliable transportation on a regular basis.

“We can do better for him,” she told me after her latest visit.

The man served in the Navy from 1962 to 1965. He feels he no longer deserves VA services or public assistance of any kind. He’s been “self-quarantining” himself to be safe regarding COVID-19. But he refused to open his door for a VA nurse who also visited his home, which does not have central air conditioning that’s working.

“He’s over there burning up,” a neighbor told me earlier this week.

Temperatures have hovered above 80 degrees for the past two weeks.

“He needs assistance but he will probably perish before the cavalry gets here,” his neighbor said.

Other veterans’ organizations have visited the man’s home, located on a quiet side street in that sleepy community.

“We were unable to make contact because I am sure it’s his fear,” said Robert Farmer, a veteran from Gary who operates Webb House, a private residential facility for veterans. “Me and a staff of military veterans are on it. We have not given up.”

During my visit, I recorded a video from outside the man’s home, sharing it on my “Talking Points” YouTube channel, which has prompted a few viewers to offer their help.

“Whatever he needs,” one viewer wrote to me. “We can mow his lawn, clean up trash, leave him food. But we don’t know if he’s interested, or mentally stable enough to be interested.”

He hit on the complicated crux of this man’s situation and countless other people in similar situations. When do we, as a society, help those who obviously need it yet who insist they don’t? How assertive or aggressive should we be? When do we stop caring?

“If no one cares, he will die, alone and in squalor, like your two friends here in Miller who were brothers,” another neighbor warned me. (Read my columns on their deaths at my webpage.)

After keeping tabs on the veteran’s situation this past month I came to the conclusion there are people like him in every community. They’re as invisible as loneliness. They quietly scream for help with a voice that makes no noise. Or they simply feel no one gives a damn. Even a knock on the door seems too much effort.

“Jerry, your story about the elderly man refusing help really hit close to home for me,” wrote Millie L. of Highland.

She is one of many readers who contacted me with poignant stories of similar situations with neighbors, friends or coworkers.

“My dear friend and I worked together and remained friends for 40 years. He was a bit anti-social, with other assorted issues, but he was my friend,” she wrote. “As the years went on, his mother died, then his father, and then his only sibling. He sunk into a deep depression and rarely left his home.”

“A neighbor called police when they noticed his car had not been moved, nor his sidewalk shoveled for weeks. Even though we talked on the phone every other day, I had no idea how bad he was. He was taken to the hospital and tests revealed he had advanced cancer that had spread all over his body. I was, and am still devastated by this. I can’t even imagine how much pain he had been living with and would not let a doctor treat him.”

“When his long-lost cousins were called to make medical arrangements, they found a hoarder’s disaster in that house. Nobody knew because nobody had ever been in that house.”

This is the current situation for the vet in Miller. But people give a damn. They’re trying to help. Mitchell-Erb is coordinating medical services for him through the Adam Benjamin Jr. VA outpatient clinic in Crown Point. If he agrees to it.

“I’m going to keep trying,” she said.

And I’m going to keep readers updated.

jdavich@post-trib.com