Member of Wealthy Family : Homeless Man Left on Sidewalk to Die

A homeless man, who was a member of a prominent Boston family, died over the weekend after he collapsed in a fast-food restaurant and was dumped onto the sidewalk by a security guard who thought he was drunk.

Scores of people reportedly walked past the body of Joseph Eaton, 38, outside the doorway of Carl’s Jr. restaurant near City Hall for five hours Saturday before a priest noticed that he was not breathing.

Guard George Waters said that he saw Eaton slumped over a hamburger and assumed that he had passed out because he was “drunk as a skunk.”

Slapped Face

“I tried to wake him up,” Waters said Sunday. “I shook him. I shook him just as hard as you can shake a damn car. . . . I slapped his face a little bit.”

Eaton did not respond.

“So what I did, I just got him up and dragged him out. . . . I got him up underneath the arms and dragged him out and laid him down” on the sidewalk, Waters said. “I feel sorry. If I’d known he was sick or something like that, I would have called the paramedics. I would never have put him out.”

Waters said that Eaton was still alive and breathing when he threw him out of the restaurant, and he assumed that Eaton would “sober up and get up and move on.”

A preliminary coroner’s report Monday showed apparent fresh needle marks on Eaton’s arms. Records reveal that he was arrested in 1982 by San Francisco police on a drug possession charge.

Eaton’s grandfather was Charles Freedom Eaton Jr., who died in 1987 at age of 89. Charles Eaton was an investment counselor and chairman emeritus of Eaton-Vance Group Mutual Fund and founder of Investor’s Bank & Trust Co. of Boston.

Joseph Eaton was gay, and his lover died of acquired immune deficiency syndrome a year ago, after which he began to drink again after having not touched alcohol for five years, said his brother, Henry, of Boston. He said the family paid for a rehabilitation program in the Midwest earlier this year, and afterward Eaton returned to San Francisco. He apparently had been living on the streets since Nov. 12.

Tom Thompson of Hillsborough, Calif., one of the owners of Carl’s Jr. franchises in San Francisco, said if Waters threw out an unconscious patron, “he was wrong.”

“That’s not (our) policy to carry people out of the restaurant--they have to walk out or we call the police,” Thompson said. “If somebody was unconscious and we put him out on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant and watched him die, then we should be taken out and shot ourselves.”

“I think it was criminal to do that to someone,” said the Rev. Thomas Flowers, who came upon Eaton. “If (Eaton) had been a middle-class person at a restaurant anywhere else in town and passed out, they’d have called for an ambulance or the cops if he was drunk and passed out. They wouldn’t just throw him out onto the sidewalk and let him lay there and die.”

Police officials said the case was not under investigation.