by Thomas Breen The New Haven independent
Exposure to the cold played the primary role in the death of a 65-year-old homeless man who spent the night on the Green last month as temperatures dipped below freezing.
The 65-year-old who died on Dec. 11 was named Abdulah Kanchero.
The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) determined on Jan. 6 that the cause of Kanchero’s death was “hypothermia due to environmental exposure, with other significant conditions of acute and chronic alcohol use,” according to an OCME spokesperson. The manner of Kanchero’s death was determined to be an “accident.”
In a statement sent to the Independent on Wednesday, city police spokesperson Officer Christian Bruckhart said that police started investigating Kanchero’s “sudden death” on Dec. 12.
“Detectives were able to locate video footage which showed much of Kanchero’s movements several hours prior to him being transported to the hospital,” Bruckhart wrote.
That footage begins on Wednesday, Dec. 10 at around 7:18 p.m. and continues to Thursday, Dec. 11 at 7:38 a.m.
Kanchero “is seen interacting with several people in the area of Chapel Street and Temple Street over that time span until a passerby calls 911 at about 7:31AM,” Bruckhart wrote. “He was transported to the hospital about ten minutes later. At one point, he fell off the bench, which caused a bruise/scrape to his face. There was no indication of any assault seen on video.”
Bruckhart added that an autopsy was conducted by the medical examiner, and that the cause of death was ruled to be “hypothermia due to environment exposure” and the manner of death was an accident. “The autopsy notes also noted a contributory factor to be acute and chronic alcohol use while also noting several other health issues.”
“What happened was a tragedy,” Mayor Justin Elicker said in a phone interview Wednesday. “It’s heartbreaking.”
He spoke about how the city does “everything we can to ensure that” people have a warm, safe place to stay — especially in dangerously cold weather.
Kanchero died on the same week that the city’s two warming centers, at Varick Church on Dixwell Avenue and at the 180 Center on East Street, had reached capacity. A group of advocates for the homeless rallied at City Hall on the night of Dec. 11 and pressured the city to open a temporary warming center at the municipal office building at 200 Orange St. The city closed that 200 Orange warming center a few days later when it secured money from the state to open a third warming center at the 645 Grand Ave. homeless shelter.
On Wednesday, Elicker said that the city currently has capacity for 166 people at its three warming centers as well as at the Foxon Boulevard hotel-turned-homeless shelter and at Columbus House. (Warming center spaces at those latter two sites are enabled by the state’s activation of a “severe cold weather protocol,” which went into effect Monday night and extended through Wednesday at noon.)
The city’s three warming centers have been all but full this week, Elicker reported, though no one has been turned away.
Elicker said that, on Tuesday night, 64 people stayed at the 180 Center warming center, which has a capacity for 66 people; 36 people stayed at Varick, which has a capacity for 40 people; and 40 people stayed at 645 Grand, which has a capacity for 40 people.
“It’s tragic,” Giovanni Castillo — a homeless man and member of the Unhoused Activist Community Team (U-ACT) — said on Wednesday when asked about Kanchero’s death from hypothermia. (Castillo played a key role in advocating for the city to open a temporary warming center at 200 Orange last month.)
Castillo said that he did not personally know Kanchero. He reflected on his and U-ACT’s work, including the week that Kanchero died, in reaching out to homeless New Haveners and helping them find safe places to get out of the cold. “It sucks that we weren’t able to get to him and find him,” he said. “There’s so many homeless people” in New Haven, he added. “It’s hard to know everybody.”