Perhaps suffering a form of dementia caused by hypothermia, a homeless man shed his blue winter coat early Tuesday morning, huddled next to a chain-link fence in tall frozen weeds near a small creek and died.
The unidentified man, whose body was discovered on the 4800 block of West Virginia Avenue early Tuesday morning, may have been the first casualty of a cold spell that has Denver police and shelter workers scrambling to get people off the streets.
But as forecasters predicted temperatures could drop below zero early today, many of Denver’s homeless planned to sleep on outdoor heating grates rather than on shelter cots, some by preference.
“There’s not enough beds to go around,” said Brad Meuli, president of The Denver Rescue Mission. “I can’t imagine spending the night under a viaduct on a night like this. It’s very scary.”
Meuli said his shelter showed movies Tuesday because it was snowing and only 9 degrees before nightfall and people needed shelter early. The shelter is setting up 100 beds on a chapel floor in addition to 200 beds it has upstairs, he said.
“We won’t turn anyone away,” he said.
The city’s Department of Human Services opened two emergency cold shelters Monday evening – one a church near the University of Denver to house 40 women and the other a building at the wastewater department that can house 60 men. Chartered buses carry the people to the shelters at 9:45 p.m., then take them to the Denver Rescue Mission at 5 a.m., where they are fed and released for the day.
Tuesday afternoon, Denver police officer Ed Valerio completed his daily routine of checking on the area’s homeless population on his bicycle.
“We’re doing fine. This morning I found only about half of the normal population, which tells me the other half made their way to shelters,” Valerio said.
Two hard-core homeless men, Mike Johnson and D.J., were huddling in a doorway on the 16th Street Mall near California.
“I plan to stay out here tonight. This is where I like to be,” said D.J., who said he gets robbed in the shelters. “I’ll head over to my (warm-air) grate and I’ll be just fine.”
Johnson wasn’t doing so well, shivering uncontrollably in the 6-degree weather. “It’s my feet. They’ve been frostbitten four times, so they get cold pretty easily,” he said. He had a hotel voucher for a room Tuesday.
“See you guys tomorrow morning,” said Valerio, as he pedaled off toward the District VI substation. Valerio will be back on his bike at 6 a.m. today, waking between 35 and 40 homeless in the downtown area to make sure they were safe through the night and to hustle them along to food and coffee.
“Some of these guys just want to be out here, not in the shelters,” he said. “I just try to keep an eye on them, to make sure they’re safe.”
Meuli said people have been known to freeze to death when the temperature was as high as 40 degrees. It was much colder than that Monday night.
Valerio said he’s seen it before: homeless people inexplicably undressing in bitter-cold weather.
“They just lose all sense of reality,” Valerio said.
The phenomenon is called “paradoxical undressing,” said Amy Martin, deputy coroner of the Denver Medical Examiner’s Office. People become disoriented and can hallucinate, she said.
Denver police spokesman Sonny Jackson said authorities are trying to determine whether the homeless man froze to death. He said it does not appear that the man was the victim of foul play.
Bill Baca, 59, of 4845 W. Virginia Ave., said he saw a blue coat in bushes near the creek Tuesday morning, and then he saw the body.
“Gee, it was cold last night,” Baca said. “I don’t know what on earth possessed him to take his jacket off.”
Staff writer Kirk Mitchell can be reached at 303-820-1206 or kmitchell@denverpost.com.
