A homeless man vanished in Norfolk. Now a community is looking for Leroy.

Norfolk — It started with a single Nextdoor post in March:

For years a homeless man slept on the corner of 21st street & Colley Ave. His name is Leroy. For about a month now he has been gone from there. Does anyone by chance happen to know what happened to him?

The Leroy thread now stretches to nearly 400 comments on Norfolk’s Colonial Place/Riverview Nextdoor site, bleeding over into other community groups — all worried about a lone, bent figure who’s been a fixture in the neighborhood for decades.

No one seemed to know where Leroy came from or how he wound up living on their streets. He wasn’t prone to chitchat, even with those who tried. He didn’t panhandle or hold up a sign asking for help. Few knew his name until the Nextdoor conversation began.

Is he the man who was always reading a book while he sat there on the corner?

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He would walk there from the park with all his big duffel bag on his back. Like Atlas bearing the weight of the world.

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He disappeared when it got very cold.

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I think about him often and have missed seeing him as well. Pray he is okay.

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Some did more than bow their heads. They called shelters, hospitals, nursing homes, the medical examiner’s office. Checked with police. Put word on the streets. Pieced together clues and dug into his background.

“They turned into detectives,” said Sally Hartman, who lives in the area and says she’s never seen that much interest in any one subject on its Nextdoor site.

“And it’s the biggest outpouring of really positive comments I’ve seen in a long, long time because it can go either way on there,” Hartman said of Nextdoor, where threads can quickly turn un-neighborly in these politically touchy times.

“It made me realize we have such a community of caring people,” she said. “Some had reached out to him more than others, but apparently we were all watching him and wishing him well. I bet he had no idea.”

I am very worried where he might be.

Sally Hartman on the porch of her Norfolk home. Hartman says she often saw Leroy Dublin, a homeless man, at the corner of Colley Avenue and 21st Street in Ghent. "He was always just a fixture in the community — I still drive by now and think good thoughts about him. And I wish he knew how many people cared about him." (Kaitlin McKeown/Virginia Media)

Why are so many fretting about a destitute man they barely knew? There’s certainly no shortage of down-on-their-luck folks, even in one of the wealthiest areas of the city — especially since the pandemic.

Has anyone checked the tent city on 19th Street?

The tents sprang up near Ghent School in November, an encampment of dozens who had nowhere else to go. When the city forced them to move in May, residents didn’t exactly object.

Humans tend to look the other way when a problem feels overwhelming, said Jason Parker, a senior lecturer in the psychology department at Old Dominion University.

“Large groups seem scary,” he said, “threatening.”

But while throngs can become faceless, an individual is easier to “see,” said Parker’s wife, Stasi Betts, who’s also a psychologist.

“You know you can’t save them all,” she said, “but you might be able to save this one.”

Hartman is among those who have tried to find a roof for Leroy over the years, either at a shelter or one of the more permanent places set aside for the needy.

“The people I spoke to at the city said they’d tried to get him into housing but he wouldn’t do it,” she said. “Sometimes people just don’t want what we think they should want.”

Instead, Leroy clung to one of Ghent’s busiest intersections, eventually becoming a landmark on the daily drive, a staple of the community.

Leroy is a Norfolk icon! … I know for 22-ish years he has been on that corner every night.

He’d head to the intersection around dusk — his deeply stooped profile shuffling along in all kinds of weather. His days were spent in a small park near Hampton Boulevard, his nights wherever he could pitch a makeshift tent undisturbed. In between, he’d spend hours sitting on a low stone wall just outside the Colley and 21st Street underpass, reading by the light of a streetlamp next to the Rite Aid.

I would find him reading newspaper inserts and one day a book on self-improvement. That broke my heart.

Reading instead of panhandling struck a chord with those who passed by. It seemed more dignified. Took an edge off the guilt that creeps into the usual intersection encounters.

“Leroy didn’t ask for anything and he didn’t bother anyone,” said Neal Shytles, who operates a street ministry. “He actually seemed to have a hard time accepting things from people. Sometimes he would and sometimes he wouldn’t.”

I offered one day to help him but he said no.

Which had the effect of making some residents even more determined. Tactics were developed. Buy two cups of coffee and nonchalantly leave one on the stone wall. Slip a few bucks into his duffel bag when he wasn’t looking.

I always wanted to do more for him.

Merrie Jo Milner, a social justice advocate involved in feeding homeless people, said Leroy often shook his head when she tried to hand him a bagged meal.

“When he did take it, I always suspected it was just to make me feel good,” she said. “If I came by later and saw him actually eating it, I’d get so excited.”

But there was one thing Leroy always seemed hungry for: More reading material.

I used to drop off copies of The New York Times for him ...

That Nextdoor comment came from Chris Melhuish, a retired Navy man who lives in Larchmont and managed to get Leroy talking now and then.

“He liked the op-ed pages in the paper,” Melhuish said. “We would talk about political events going on overseas. He was very literate. Sharp. Very current with what was going on.”

Leroy offered little of his own story and Melhuish was reluctant to pry. He did learn that Leroy had served in the Navy, too — eight years, enlisted, photographer’s mate — and that he was originally from Florida, but not much else. No hint of what led him to where he was.

“Pretty much all he said was that he’d made mistakes in his life and he was reconciled to that,” Melhuish said. “He said he had no one to blame but himself. I was hoping to connect the dots at some point but the clock ran out. I didn’t even know his last name until someone posted it on Nextdoor.”

Leroy Dublin is the man who stayed on the corner of Colley and 21st. I have not heard from anyone who knows where he is now.

Milner says the last time she saw Leroy, on Dec. 30, he wasn’t feeling well. When she offered to go buy him something special to eat, he insisted on paying, pressing a $20 bill into her hand. When he refused to accept the change, they made a deal that she’d spend it on soup for him the next night.

“I went by every night for, like, the next two weeks and he was never there,” she said. “I still have his change in an envelope.”

Soon, the community was looking for Leroy. Members searched near and far, building on one another’s posted tips, hoping to find his family. Through online records, newspaper archives and ancestry databases, they turned up his high school in Miami, an article that described him as a gifted student with dreams of majoring in zoology, and his Navy photo from 1987 — a smiling image in a crisp white uniform.

The man in this 1987 U.S. Navy photo is believed to be Leroy Dublin, a homeless man who was a fixture in Ghent before disappearing in December, triggering an outpouring of community concern. The photo was found on Ancestry.com by Sandra Jones. (US Navy /SANDRA JONES)

But they found nothing to fill the empty chapters. No trail to a street corner in Ghent. And no living relatives who might know his fate.

If only he knew the effect he has on us all. So many strangers coming together in hopes of finding him.

Then last month, Joe Young, an attorney with Rutter Mills, checked Norfolk court records and “bang, there it was” — a public document from Sentara Heart Hospital stating that Leroy Dublin, a homeless “69-year-old African American male” had been admitted Dec. 31 with symptoms of “COVID-19 pneumonia” and “severe malnutrition.”

His physical and mental condition deteriorated rapidly. Within a week of admission, Sentara was asking the court to appoint a guardian to make decisions on his behalf.

If a homeless person dies, how would we be able to find out?

Privacy laws mean hospitals won’t tell. Neither will the court-appointed guardian. Or the sheriff’s office, which takes custody of unclaimed bodies. Or the funeral home that has the contract to carry out the cremations.

I looked in the obits last night but didn’t see his name.

There won’t be one — not without family or friends to submit an obituary to the paper and cover the cost.

Young thinks about Leroy every time he drives through that intersection.

“There’s a little dip in the wall where he always sat,” Young said. “I guess it’s from his weight over all those years.”

The mystery now: “Is he dead or alive?” Young wondered. “We may never know.”

Joe Young, an attorney with Rutter Mills, at the firm. He found the court records that solved at least part of the mystery of the fate of Leroy Dublin, a homeless man who was a fixture in Ghent for years. (Kaitlin McKeown/Virginia Media)

Sarah Noffsinger, who insisted Leroy accept bottles of water on hot days, made a marker to honor his spot — a wooden cross painted with the words “Leroy’s Ledge.” It didn’t last long in the whoosh of traffic but she’s planning a sturdier version.

“I just feel like everybody deserves to be honored and remembered,” she said.

I can contribute a few bucks towards your costs.

Leroy may have vanished into the ether, but the man who had so little left something valuable behind.

“There was something about him that brought out the humanity in people,” Melhuish said. “I just hope everyone will branch out now and help other people.”

Would anyone be interested in being part of a team that builds solutions for homelessness and hopelessness?

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Yes. I would.