Rescue House Emptied; Rescuer In Limbo

The cats and cat corpses are gone. Neighbors rarely smell the stench anymore. Now the question is: What happens to the house? And the kind man who lived there?

The house in question is a one-family colonial on Winthrop Avenue between Percival and Goffe in the Beaver Hills neighborhood.

For years neighbors noticed cats coming in and out of the house. They knew and liked the owner who fed the cats.

Then they started smelling a foul odor. Often. It got so bad the city had to come in and condemn the house last Aug. 31. Then crews spent days clearing out what turned out to be many Dumpsters’ worth of hoarded junk — including hundreds of old VHS tapes and destroyed fixtures — piled layers deep inside the torn-apart, uninhabitable building, which long lacked running water.

Months later, neighbors report smelling odors only occasionally, on warmer days. The boarded-up house continues airing out, its windows open to the elements, as officials work to give it a future. This past Monday night the Board of Alders retroactively approved a $41,000 emergency procurement that the city government’s anti-blight agency, the Livable City Initiative (LCI), spent clearing out the house. LCI hopes to recoup the money. It has put a lien on the house for the money; assuming that the 74-year-old owner doesn’t pay it, the next step will be to foreclose on the property, then put it up for sale, said LCI Deputy Director Frank D’Amore.

The house’s owner wanders New Haven during the day with his belongings in two bags. He has money in the bank but no place to sleep, so he rides Metro-North trains until dawn.

“I messed up. I screwed up,” the owner acknowledged in an interview. (He asked not to have his name published or any current photos; just the one above from last August.) He said he worked with the city for years to try to clean out his house, and despite repeated warnings, was caught by surprise on condemnation day.

Meanwhile, the city’s animal shelter continues to try to save the lives of, and find new homes for, some of the cats its staff removed from the house.

As masked city staffers worked with McVac Environmental and three other contractors to thoroughly clean the building in early September, the shelter’s staff poked through the mounds of rubbish to find live and dead felines the owner had been sheltering and feeding.

“We initially went through and picked up 24, 25 cats,” said police Officer Joe Manganiello, who oversees the shelter. ​“We discovered that they were coming in and out of the house through different holes. There was so much trash in the house, it was difficult to capture them. They were burrowing in and out of the trash. That took a whole day to do that.”

Back at the shelter, staffers discovered that many of the females were pregnant. Soon they had another 10 or more kittens to deal with.

They began finding homes for the cats, but learned that some of them had ringworm, which is ​“difficult to eradicate in cats,” Manganiello said. They tried to cure the cats of the infection. They succeeded in some cases, and found homes for those cats. They had to euthanize other infected cats. The house’s owner contributed $2,000 toward the effort, Manganiello confirmed.

Seven months later, the staff is still working on curing and finding homes for the rest. ​“I was hoping it was something that would take a month to care of. You don’t realize how long it can carry on,” Manganiello said. He said several shelter staffers were infected with ringworm, one of them needing to take a week and half off work.

Other cats slipping in and out of the house were left alone because they were feral, Manganiello said.

Some cats still visit the house, according to Niyobe McMillian-Oglesby. McMillian-Oglesby, who’s 42, has lived next door to the now-condemned Winthrop house since she was 3 years old (and lived one house over before that). She likes the neighborhood, she said — and was relieved to watch last September’s clean-up.

“The garbage they took out of there — it was crazy!” she recalled. ​“It had to be four Dumpsters of stuff — and that’s what I saw. And I work, so I’m sure I missed some of it.” She said she still smells lingering odors form the house when the temperature reaches 65 degrees.

“They told us to keep our windows closed for three days,” Rebecca Moore recalled of the clean-up. She lives in the house on the other side of the condemned house.

She said she appreciated the city’s work. ​“They haven’t finished the job,” she added, noting the house’s boards and empty windows and the litter surrounding it. The roof also has a hole.

Moore hasn’t seen the house’s owner, since the condemnation. She — as well as other neighbors, LCI Deputy Director Rafael Ramos, and Manganiello — spoke fondly of him. They described him as ​“educated,” friendly, pleasant to interact with, a man who cared about cats. ​“I hope all is well with him.”

Money, No Bed

It is not all well with the owner.

The owner has $30,000 in the bank. But he can’t seem to land a place to live. He won’t consider a homeless shelter, he said, because he has colitis; he needs to hit the bathroom every hour or so.

The roots of his practice of feeding cats began in 1999, when he lived in an apartment on Mansfield Street, he recalled in the interview Wednesday, which took place at a carrel in the basement of the public library, where he uses the computer to maintain contact with the outside world.

A native of White Plains, N.Y., he had come to Connecticut with his then-wife from California. He’d studied at Redlands University and then the University of California at Berkeley, where he graduated in 1968 with a zoology degree, he said. He started out teaching middle school in Waterbury until the seventh-graders exhausted him, he said. He and his wife moved to New Haven for the livelier culture. She left town when they divorced in the mid-1970s.

“I should have never gotten married in the first place; I’m a reclusive guy,” he said.

He stuck around and found a job with a pioneering autism support agency called Benhaven. The job lasted 20 years, much of it spent working overnight as a group home counselor.

In the Mansfield apartment, he discovered stray cats wandering the wooded area between his street and Prospect Street. He started feeding them. Then he discovered a colony of 20 cats.

At the time, his landlord, Yale, was evicting the man and his neighbors to convert apartments to student housing. By the time they got the man out in 2000, he had grown attached to feeding the cats.

With savings, he found a house he could afford to buy, the circa-1920 one-family on Winthrop. He purchased it from the family of former Mayor John C. Daniels, according to city records.

For the first year he lived on Winthrop, he trekked nightly back to Mansfield Street to feed the cat colony. ​“I became obsessed with it,” he recalled. ​“I couldn’t imagine” not feeding them. After a year, a regional group that feeds cats showed up and informed him it could handle the job from there.

By that time, the man had noticed a dozen wild cats living in his and his neighbors’ back yard. So he started feeding and caring for them. A vegan, he said he feels passionately about protecting animals. The neighbors didn’t like what he was doing at first, he recalled, but they eventually came around.

Cat rescue became a mission. He said he has rescued 300 cats over 35 years, sending them to six different no-kill shelters.

One December about ten years ago, he said, he was leaving his cellar door open for the cats to come in for food. Then a pipe froze and burst. He struggled to turn off the water. Once he succeeded, he decided not to turn it back on. As a first-time homeowner, he said, he didn’t know how to fix it.

And the job would cost a lot of money; he lived on a fixed budget. Under new management, Benhaven fired all its staff, including him in 2002, he said. He was living on part-time gigs.

So from that day on, he lived in the house without running water. ​“I took showers at other places,” he said. ​“If I needed drinking water, I bought it. I had a system down.”

Meanwhile, trash started accumulating outside the house. Neighbors soon were complaining about uncut grass and piles of trash on the property, according to records on file at LCI. In 2003, LCI issued a housing code violation. The owner responded.

“I commend you on the clean-up you completed at your property,” then-LCI neighborhood specialist Elaine Braffman wrote at the time.

Complaints for years centered only on the exterior of the property, LCI’s Ramos said. LCI had no reason or right to go inside the house, he said.

Unbeknownst to neighbors, piles were forming inside the house, too.

The owner already tended to allow belongings to pile up in his home, he said. The piles grew when he took up video-recording TV shows.

Eventually, he said, ​“I had 5,000 [VHS tapes] in there. That was my hoarding thing. I paid money for them. I used to be a fanatic about recording everything on PBS, the Learning Channel, the History Channel. I never watched most of them.”

He lost his part-time job. By the late aughts, he was living on a $750 monthly social security check. He paid his taxes, but not his mortgage. The bank initiated a foreclosure. But it kept writing to the owner offering to refinance. The owner ignored the letters.

After his mother died at 100 years old, he inherited $150,000, he said. He paid off the mortgage.

But he continued to struggle. He loaned a friend in trouble much of his inheritance. He never got it back, he said.

Complaints continued coming to LCI. The owner said he worked for years with the city, trying to clear out the house. But he didn’t want to use his savings to fix the place. ​“I wanted to leave. I wasn’t going to put a dime into that house. I hated that house. I had one foot out the door for four, five years,” he said.

He did fill large garbage bags of junk to put out for weekly trash. But he failed to get on top of the mess.

By 2015 the complaints included the stench. It became a persistent topic at neighborhood management team meetings. In 2015, LCI issued another order to the owner to remove feral cats and ​“eliminate heavy odor emanating from this address. Now posing a health condition to surrounding houses.” LCI warned him he was facing possible condemnation.

Condemnation Day

Yet the owner was surprised when Ramos and his crew showed up on Aug. 31 with the condemnation order. Somehow, the owner had still hoped to work his way through.

“You can imagine how I felt: The first thing they did was knock out the windows,” he recalled.

He asked to go inside to retrieve belongings. He said he had only five minutes. He was in ​“a state of shock,” he recalled. He grabbed a new tablet he had recently purchased. He filled bags with some of his favorite books. But he couldn’t find his expired driver’s license or any of his personal identification. He said he lost his ​“entire library of academic parapsychology books and other science books from my University of California, Berkeley, days, all of my clothes, all of my kitchen appliances, some of which were brand new, all of my furniture, all of my memorabilia like family photos and videos of my late mother’s 100th-birthday celebration, my papers and documents from my college and teaching career, my social security card … everything I ever loved and cherished.”

Ramos — who said the owner had hours to pore through interior debris for his belongings — recalled that inspectors were stunned at what they found inside the house: the layers of VHS tapes and other feces-covered trash covering the basement floor. Other debris consumed upper floors amid long-destroyed appliances. A plastic bag was placed on a toilet seat to capture and then dispose of human waste. Inspectors deemed the building unfit for human habitation.

“It was unbelievable,” Ramos said of the condition inside the house. He said LCI typically encounters a couple of hoarding cases each year requiring intervention, often intertwined with a house full of felines. Manganiello said in his three years at the shelter, he hasn’t seen this big a cat colony in need of rescue. Ramos said the owner had hours to look through the house, and did return to it several times during the week that the crew was cleaning it.

The owner agreed to an offer from the city to go to the hospital for a psychiatric evaluation. As the clean-up began, he spent four hours in the emergency room, he recalled, before a doctor checked in on him. She asked if he felt suicidal. He said no. She asked if he had thoughts of committing violence. He said no.

“That was my ​‘examination,’” he said.

Back out, the owner returned to the property as the cleaning and clearing and cat-retrieval operation stretched into a week. He made another pass at finding his ID.

Eventually, the city told the owner to stay away from the property. Ramos said they were concerned that his continual feeding of cats would hamper efforts to clean up. The man complied.

And commenced wandering.

Next Steps

The owner consulted a legal aid lawyer, who he said called Ramos’s office. He returned to LCI seeking help finding a place to live. He said an LCI relocation staffer told him because he couldn’t keep a clean place, he couldn’t be moved into public senior housing. He had also let the city know he still had $30,000 in the bank.

LCI’s Ramos said he referred the man last fall to state protective services for the elderly, which has extensive experience helping people in similar situations obtain photo IDs and housing. (The man said he doesn’t remember that referral occurring.) Ramos said Wednesday he would like to try again to help the man and connect him again to state protective services or other agencies, if he can get in touch with him. 

“We’re not a social service agency,” Ramos said, ​“but we can make a referral.”

Besides needing a place to sleep, the man contends with ulcerative colitis, leg lymphedema, and pruritis. He has access to his bank account, he said. But without photo ID, he said, he can’t rent an apartment. He’s thinking of buying an RV, but would need to regain his license, he said.

Staying in a homeless shelter wouldn’t work, he said. Among the offered reasons: Thanks to his colitis, he needs to use a bathroom every hour or so He said he is hesitant to have the colon operation that would help with the colitis, but require walking around with a waste bag attached to his body.

For now he purchases a $495 monthly Metro-North unlimited-ride pass, he said. He uses it to ride the New York-New Haven line overnight so he can catch some winks — despite the bright lights — - and have access to the lavatory. He generally rides a train that arrives in Grand Central at either 11:45 p.m. or 12:45 p.m., he said. He waits at Grand Central until he can catch the a 1 a.m. train back to New Haven. He waits in Union Station from 3:15 until 4:30 for the next train, for one final round trip, he said.

The man spends his days in New Haven, much of it at the library. He’d like to consult a lawyer about whether he can or should try to forestall the pending foreclosure of the shell of his Winthrop Avenue home.

While accepting responsibility for the condition of his house, the owner expressed disappointment and anger at the city’s response, at ​“a 74-year-old man with no place to go.”

“It doesn’t get any more unfair than this, in my opinion, except when I take a larger panoramic view of the immense, horrendous, horrific suffering transpiring around the world, in both the human and animal kingdoms,” he reflected. ​“I can deal with it, as I am not one of those who really suffer in this world.”

At the library Wednesday, the homeowner was asked if he had ever applied for an Elm City residency card, an official government photo ID. He said he had never heard of it. A librarian told the man he can obtain one at City Hall’s vital statistics office; she wrote the information on a piece of paper, handed it to him, and suggested he make the trip.