Hard Life, Rough Neighborhood Spell Death for a Tough Old Man

Brightly colored balloons hung from the cart fashioned from old bicycle parts and junk. Cheap plastic toys filled its large, grimy basket. At 72, Francisco Gonzales rode around the streets of his neighborhood every day--selling flowers, trinkets and dolls.

Business wasn’t great, but then Gonzales didn’t live in splendor. A dented, dirty trailer, its windows mostly broken and covered with cardboard or plastic, was home. It sat in a dirty junkyard between graffiti-marred buildings in an industrial area off East 63rd Street in Florence. Piles of aged auto parts and scraps littered the yard, fenced off by barbed wire.

It’s a rough neighborhood. One store owner, asked if he had ever been robbed, laughed uncontrollably. But Gonzales was tough too. His family says he often had to fend off robbers.

“He was a strong man,” said his son, Efren. “They never got close to him.”

Early Monday someone did. A passer-by found Gonzales’ body shortly after 7 a.m. among the sprawl of the junkyard. Sheriff’s deputies said he had been beaten to death.

There are no suspects in custody and no motive has been found. “It could have been anything,” said Deputy Gil Lesley.

But some neighbors say robbery may have cost Gonzales his life. “I knew something was going to happen to the old man,” said a man at a radiator shop who declined to give his name. “He always carried cash.”

Deputies would not say whether Gonzales had any money on him; acquaintances said Gonzales sometimes carried about $100.

Some of that money came from the nights Gonzales spent taking Polaroid pictures at a bar down the street. For $1, $2 or $3--and sometimes for free--Gonzales snapped photos of patrons, doing brisk business on holidays.

He was a fixture in the area. Although many people didn’t know Gonzales by name, almost everyone knew the old man selling toys from his bike.

“He was a very nice guy,” said Christopher Lee, who works at a market where Gonzales used to buy groceries.

“He went everywhere,” said Lee, sweeping his hands to indicate the panorama of used car lots, small markets, lumber yards and bars on Central Avenue.

One man who didn’t know Gonzales is the man who owns the lot where the old trailer, which has neither water nor electricity, sits.

“Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy,” Bernard Bergman said when told that Gonzales had lived and died in his auto parts storage yard. “I didn’t know a thing about it.”

Tuesday, the yard quietly bespoke Gonzales’ recent presence. Two wrinkled airless balloons hung from a pole on his three-wheel cart. Its front tire was flat. There was a blood stain on the ground a few feet away.

Two years ago Gonzales moved here from Mexico to be near his family, which came to the area in the 1960s. Two sons live nearby on 69th Street. The man at the radiator shop said that Gonzales’ sons had tried to get him to move in with them--without success.

“He was just an independent codger,” he said. “He didn’t want to go live with anyone.”