Homeless Reached End of Painful Roads on Cold L.A. Nights : 4 Who Died: A Tangle in Threads of Life

Tommy Allen, Navy man. Ralph Frederick, mechanic. James Miller, Army veteran. Valerie Moreno, pianist and one-time prostitute.

In the span of 48 hours, their four lives ended--on a sidewalk, in public parks, alongside a junked car--when cold swept the mythic postcard sunshine out of Los Angeles. All were in their 50s--well short of the life span the actuarial tables promise to Americans of the 1980s.

All were fighting the bottle, which means that they were fighting themselves, their families and friends and myriad private demons. All save one were basically homeless, but all of them had something that passed for shelter: an abandoned car, a hotel room, friends or relatives who put them up.

On three consecutive nights last weekend, they all lay down in the cold and lost their battles. Their deaths, across the compass points of Los Angeles, ignited a spark of concern which fired authorities to take unusual measures for the homeless--33,000 by one estimate--in the city’s streets and parks and alleys.

The City Council opened City Hall to them, then moved them to a building in Little Tokyo. It relaxed zoning restrictions on homeless shelter and temporarily opened city Housing Authority apartments. The Board of Supervisors voted to send workers out to persuade the homeless to accept shelter and to hand out hotel vouchers when temperatures fall below 40. They asked local schools to open their gymnasiums, and National Guard units to open their armories.

For these four, it was their deaths, not their lives, that made important people take notice. But each death was woven from the varied fabric of how each of them had lived. And braided together, those threads formed a knot of circumstance that no one could ever quite untangle.

On the day Valerie Moreno died of the cold, two coats hung in her closet--a soft red one, and a tan one with big buttons.

A good wool blanket lay on her bed. Cans of soup and beans were stacked on her window sill. About $300 sat in her bank account. A radiator regularly hissed warmth into her hotel room, where the rent was paid until Feb. 1.

Yet Valerie Moreno died--on the streets, in front of a restaurant in Chinatown, where she had once been a call girl, and had made good money and good friends in “the most superior (community) in the whole city of Los Angeles,” she wrote.

She died of hypothermia; her body temperature was too low to register on the thermometer that Dr. Jeffrey Polekoff used at French Hospital. “I’ve never had a patient who felt quite that cold,” Dr. Polekoff said.

In one of the notebooks she maintained, recording her grievances about her life, Moreno had once written the word in blue ink--HYPOTHERMIA.

Couldn’t Be Saved

It was 36 degrees outside when Dr. Polekoff got to the hospital last Friday. Two hours later, none of medicine’s lifesaving measures could revive her.

She was 54 years old, and her 40 years on her own, sliding into psychiatric and drinking problems, had made her a stranger to her family--an educated, cultured family, related on her mother’s side, the legend goes, to one-time Vice President Charles Dawes.

Moreno’s mother had a USC music degree, and Moreno never forgot her own piano lessons. Even in her last tormented years, she could dazzle acquaintances with classics played from memory.

Moreno’s death left her family with one more enigma: why she would turn her back, yet again, on people who cared for her, on “the comforts of home,” as she wrote of her hotel room.

“I don’t like to say my mom died in Chinatown on a curb--it hurts,” said her son, who asked that his name not be used.

Always Refused

He invited her to live with them, but only if she took her medicine and gave up booze, the whiskey-and-milk mix she liked to sip. She always refused.

Why she died “hasn’t all come together” for him yet. But the Chinatown years were her happiest, when “she was at the height of her existence, when everything was going good, at least in her frame of reference,” he said.

Perhaps, when she left her fourth-floor room in the Olympic Hotel a few days before she died, he said, “she went down to find a dream, something that happened a long time ago. And the world changed, but she didn’t.”

The independence Moreno sought when she left home at age 14 exacted a stiff price.

A doctor once told her that she would become disoriented as she got older. “She used to buy books on what signs and symptoms to look for,” her son said.

At first, she had money, some of it from prostitution. She owned houses and a hotel, her son remembered. But as mental illness took hold, things went awry. Two marriages failed. “Everything she had, she lost.”

By the early 1980s, she was living in board-and-care facilities, with three meals a day and medical and psychiatric care, paid for by the government, with a few dollars left.

Too few dollars, according to a man who knew her at the Blackburn Center on Alvarado Street. She chose to “move out of this place, find a place cheaper,” he said. People at the Blackburn “don’t have that kind of money to blow on something to drink.”

In July, 1985, when she left the Blackburn, Fred Christiansen began to take care of her, a government-paid “provider” who brought her meals, and made sure that her bills were paid.

Couldn’t Convince Her

“I eat and sleep all the time and get better,” she wrote at first.

But “I could never convince her to lay off the alcohol,” Christiansen said.

When she vanished, he and hotel manager Ron Harris scoured the neighborhood as far as MacArthur Park, where she liked to feed the ducks. “I never dreamed she was going down to Chinatown,” he said.

There will be no funeral. Her son has bought a crypt at Forest Lawn.

For Valerie Moreno, everything was “downhill, no matter how hard she tried,” says her son. “So what I did is, I bought a crypt, and symbolically I got it at the very top, like this is the one place I wish she could have been, even though she wasn’t. Maybe this is the one time she could stay on top.”

They found Ralph Frederick in a vacant lot on East 23rd Street, his body lying near some piles of rubbish, the discarded carcasses of a pet guinea pig and a small, tan dog, and the abandoned orange AMC Matador in which he had lived.

The skin on his hands was broken and bloody. The rats had evidently found him before the neighbors did.

It was early last Saturday morning, and coroner’s investigators estimate that he had been dead for at least 12 hours. Heart disease, complicated by the extreme cold, had killed him.

Frederick had been complaining about the cold for days. Although he usually passed the time at the edge of the lot, sitting on a rusty metal chair, the cold had forced him to put his aching legs to use.

Huddled in a Tire

Carlos Jerez said that Frederick spent his last days huddled in a tire outside an auto shop on Central Avenue. The black rubber would absorb the heat from the sun, and Frederick would depend on it to stay warm.

At night, Frederick, who turned 55 on New Year’s Day, would retreat to the back seat of the AMC, or to a bed of old clothes he had crumpled beneath a palm tree.

“When there was too much cold, he would go in the car, but lately he was looking for more heat, so he went to the tires,” Jerez said.

People on the 1200 block of East 23rd said Frederick drank too much, and told stories that had no real beginning or end. He never bathed, found his meals in garbage cans, usually had a can of beer or a bottle of wine and was always asking for money.

But neighbors said he didn’t really bother them. Compared to the prostitutes, drug dealers and gang members who frequent the area, Frederick was almost a good neighbor, they said.

Talked About Ohio

He used to talk about Ohio, where his parents lived and where he once worked as a mechanic, and about his ex-wife and children. He used to say that the three of them lived nearby, although coroner’s investigators have been unable to locate any relatives.

He said he had been in the Army, served in Vietnam, but couldn’t make a go of it when he got back. He never gave details, and screamed when residents asked for them.

Augustin Salazar said Frederick told him that he had been drifting around Los Angeles for 20 years. About five months ago, he shaved off Frederick’s beard when Frederick complained that it was getting too long. Frederick refused Salazar’s offers to drive him to a soup kitchen where he could get a warm meal and some help.

“He didn’t want to cause people a problem,” Salazar said. “The alcohol was his real problem.”

Juan, Salazar’s 11-year-old son, said Frederick sometimes talked about dying. He said Frederick wore a hospital identification bracelet, so that people would know who he was if anything ever happened to him. And, Juan said, his most prized possessions were the plastic patient identification cards he got from County-USC Medical Center.

When Frederick died that cold night, carefully hidden under some socks and papers on the back window ledge of the car were the two hospital ID cards.

Around dawn on Jan. 16, security guards found James Marland Miller in Hansen Dam Park in Pacoima.

He was covered with a blanket and lying under a tree behind the Baby Beef Burgers eatery on Foothill Boulevard. He died, the coroner’s office said, of hypothermia and chronic alcoholism.

The night before, the 57-year-old Miller had twice been offered help, and twice he turned away from it--first from guards at the park, then from homeless acquaintances Karen Davis and Jimmy Harris, who live in a two-wheeled wooden cart in an alley.

They had heard Miller cry out shortly after 12:30 a.m. “I recognized his voice right away,” Davis said. When they found Miller, he told them that he was very sick. “We carried him to our place and made arrangements for him to sleep in a larger trailer,” Davis said.

Just Disappeared

But several hours later, the World War II veteran-turned-drifter--a man who always wore colorful tams and berets and went by the nickname “Snake”--disappeared without a word.

His body remained in the county morgue on Saturday; no one has been located to claim it.

Eva Mae Jefferson met Miller in 1955, nine months after he left a San Francisco veterans’ hospital, and moved into a Pacoima rooming house where Jefferson lived with her two sons.

He was in his mid-20s, and Jefferson described him as “meticulous, caring and reliable.” All Miller had wanted was to be with his wife and two daughters, and to earn a decent living. But “when Jimmy came home, his life fell apart,” Jefferson said.

“He found out that his wife was living with another man and that totally destroyed him,” she said. “He began drowning his sorrows in a wine bottle and never stopped.”

Had War Wounds

Miller, a Georgia-born college graduate, had scraped by with handyman and construction work, but war wounds--he had been shot in the stomach and thigh--often kept him in the Veterans Administration Hospital in Sepulveda.

Melvin Gordon, chief of medical administrative services, said that Miller, who had an Army honorable discharge, was a “long-term” patient for an undisclosed “chronic medical condition.”

When Jefferson next saw Miller, two years after he vanished from the rooming house, he was depressed by his futile search for his daughters. Jefferson and others maintain that the drifter’s brother lives in New Jersey, but hospital records from Miller’s last visit do not list a next of kin.

Miller’s life, she said, was a “jigsaw puzzle.”

If anyone else was close to Miller, it likely was Bernell Hollis, who met Miller in 1958 at another Pacoima boarding house. Even then, she recalled, Miller had a problem with alcohol.

“Whiskey, beer, wine--it didn’t matter,” she said.

Returned to Her Home

Even 25 years later, whenever Miller went on a drinking binge, he would usually wind up at Hollis’ house.

“I’m a Christian and I couldn’t stand to see him on the street,” she explained.

Two years ago, Hollis said, Miller decided to “change his life” and started attending church. It didn’t last long.

He showed up at her door on Thanksgiving, when he was feeling sick, and again at Christmas, when Hollis fed him dinner. He called on New Year’s Day and asked to come over for a meal, but Hollis hadn’t cooked, and he didn’t come.

“He had a room, he told me, on Lake View Terrace,” Hollis said. “That’s why I can’t understand him being frozen to death.”

Sarah Latham of Lake View Terrace identified Miller’s body at the park; he stayed with her family on and off for two years.

Three weeks ago, she said, Miller left her house without a word. She saw him the day before he died, at Phil’s Market on Foothill Boulevard. “He asked me to cook brown beans and said he would be home for dinner. But he never came.”

Tommy Dale Allen’s family had long worried about finding him dead. But most of the time it wasn’t the elements that worried them, so much as the thought of the bottle.

Alcohol had captured Allen and sickened him. At 50, he already had pancreatitis and emphysema. For the last five years he had been unable to hold a job. According to his family, he would stay with various relatives until they could no longer put up with his drinking and threw him out.

“You always know in the back of your mind this day is going to come,” said his daughter, Rene Hall, of Salinas. “You just don’t know when or where.”

“Where” was Progress Park in Paramount, where large fingers of winter-yellowed grass and neatly maintained softball diamonds curl around neighborhoods of worn-down cars and worn-down homes. On occasion, homeless men spread their coats in the outfield and spend the night.

Jogger Finds Him

At about 8 a.m. last Sunday morning, after a night when the temperature fell to 42 degrees, a jogger saw Allen lying on the ground, wearing only a T-shirt, jacket, pants and boots. He was clutching a plastic bag that held a radio. His body was tinged with ice. His body temperature had fallen below 60 degrees.

A few days before, his relatives said, they had seen him for the last time.

He had visited his ex-wife, Barbara Ulch, at her Paramount home. They had married young--he was 17, she was 15--and had been divorced since 1969.

On this day, Allen and Ulch discussed his going to a detoxification center, but it never came about. Before the day was through, Allen left, for parts unknown.

Tommy Allen had been a Navy man once, serving on the aircraft carrier Yorktown in the 1950s.

“The Navy was a way of life that he loved,” said Donald Lampley, who served with Allen in the Western Pacific. Lampley, who hadn’t seen Allen in 27 years, went to the memorial service Thursday after reading of his death in a newspaper. Family members told him that “Tommy had said his days in the Navy were the best years of his life.”

Visited Injured Daughter

Last fall, his youngest daughter was paralyzed in an auto accident, and for several weeks, family members said, Allen stopped drinking and spent long days visiting her in the hospital. He lived in his ex-wife’s home. Then he slipped back into drinking and slept in the parks.

When authorities called Ulch last week, they told her that Allen had died of cardiac arrest due to hypothermia, with chronic alcoholism as a contributing cause.

Over and over, the family pondered what else they might have done.

“There are no safety nets for some people,” Hall said. “Some just fall through the cracks. I realize it’s also a family’s responsibility to take care of their own, but it’s up to the individual, too. I don’t understand why it is that some don’t make it in society.

“We didn’t have the answers for him. Nobody has those answers. . . . “

Staff writers Bob Baker, David Freed, Marita Hernandez and Dean Murphy contributed to this story.