On the coldest morning of the new year, as temperatures in Licking County hovered below zero, a man found in a vehicle in a Walmart parking lot off 21st Street died later at Licking Memorial Hospital.
A Newark Fire Department EMS squad was dispatched to the Walmart at 9:40 a.m. Wednesday, Jan. 22, on a report of someone suffering from hypothermia, according to department records.
The EMS team arrived at 9:45 a.m. and transported the man to Licking Memorial Hospital at 9:57 a.m. The man’s name was unknown to the EMS squad, and he was listed on the incident report as John Doe.
The Licking County coroner’s office said that a man who was reportedly suffering from hypothermia, identified by Newark police as Timothy Hampton, 57, died in the emergency department at Licking Memorial.
“We’re one of the richest nations in the world, and we have people dying in their vehicles in the cold,” said Nancy Welu, who volunteers with the Newark Homeless Outreach and is part of the Newark Emergency Warming Center task force. “How does that happen?”
An autopsy had not yet been completed, and there had been no ruling on a cause of death, the coroner’s office said Friday. “The person had been very ill prior to that,” said the person who answered the phone there.
The police report said the man was conscious and breathing but “not completely alert,” and that his skin “is changing color,” which the report described as pale.
The police incident report indicates another person in the vehicle called 911 to report the situation and was also transported to the hospital. It says that the dog warden took possession of dogs also found in the vehicle.
An obituary for Hampton on the Criss Wagner Hoskinson Funeral Home website says that Hampton “passed away unexpectedly at Licking Memorial Hospital from complications due to pneumonia.”
The obituary says he was born Nov. 16, 1967, in Fresno, California, and that he was self-employed at polishing tanks and wheels on semi trucks. His Facebook page includes several videos of him and the work he did to polish chrome to a high-gloss finish.
In one of the videos, he walks around a large tanker truck showing the fenders, wheels and the large, gleaming chrome back end of the tank.
“She’s gettin’ there,” he says about the parts he had polished so far.
“Well, time to go back at it. Y’all have a good day,” he says as the video ended after he had walked around the trailer.
His obituary said, “He enjoyed fishing and listening to country music. He is survived by his step-daughters, Dianna Lightle, of Newark, and Amber Webb, of Toledo; step-grandchildren, Donald Downhour, Jr. and David Lee Downhour; and his girlfriend, Heather Burns.”
A graveside service will be held at Cedar Hill Cemetery in Newark at a later date, the obituary said.
Temperatures in Licking County have been in the single digits or a little above for most of the week, dipping below zero overnight Tuesday into Wednesday morning – with a wind chill as low as -15 early Wednesday.
Licking County has a warming center that opens when temperatures dip below 10 degrees. The shelter has been at capacity over the past few weeks – including pets that some people brought with them.
Jeff Gill, the chair of the emergency warming center task force, told The Reporting Project, “Someone staying in a car, it could be carbon monoxide, but you’re freezing to death, does it really matter? If that’s what it was, then it’s still cold weather that killed that person. ”
“It’s the kind of thing that has the people who need our services anxious,” Gill added. “They’re just not sure how official-dom sees them. They have to be secretive. This atmosphere of fear and intimidation has the potential to have a fatal outcome.”
Gill said the warming center has seen multiple incidents of people suffering from frostbite, or what seemed to be frostbite, in the past few years.
| Read more: Emergency warming shelter sees strong support in early December opening
On Jan. 8, at a meeting of the United Way Community Partners Council, local experts discussed the need for a low barrier shelter.
Deb Dingus, executive director of the United Way, said the issue of addressing homelessness has been on the community’s radar for years now – as has the need for a low barrier shelter.
A group of volunteers has organized the Licking County Warming Shelter and the Community Drop In Center at Trinity Lutheran on West Main Street in Newark, but advocates for unhoused people say more is needed.
“This is a humanitarian crisis at our doorstep,” Stephanie Dunlop, of Whole Living Recovery, said at the United Way meeting. “[These are] human beings who desire not to sleep out in the snow.”
Shannon TL Isom, president and CEO of the Community Shelter Board in Columbus, noted that there is large-scale destabilization of housing in central Ohio.
Isom asked at the meeting, “What happens if you don’t do anything? The low barrier shelter is a good question but I would say what happens if you don’t do it and your rents go up and you don’t have enough housing.”
Low barrier, she said, means that “you don’t have to prove your dignity to walk through the door.”
Low-barrier shelters often are open 24 hours and typically don’t have sobriety requirements, and they accept people who come with pets or family members.
“The number one reason communities in the Midwest have low-barrier shelters,” Isom said, “is because people die.”
This is a developing story and will be updated with additional information as it becomes available.
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