Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 7, 1993 TAG: 9311070238
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By JULES LO Associated Press
DATELINE: DAYTONA BEACH, FLA. LENGTH: Long
Verlin Bell's routine began, as usual, in pitch darkness. His last stop, still an hour before sunup, was in the parking lot behind the Southern Paint Co. store on Seagrave Street.
He nudged his big green garbage truck with practiced accuracy up to the Dumpster and slid its two steel lifters into sleeves on either side. He levered the Dumpster noisily up and over the cab, tilted its contents into the brightly lit truck bed, then lowered it back in place.
As he backed away, he shoved the compactor blade in gear and glanced at the mirror.
"I always check the mirror. I look through the window in back of the cab to make sure the hydraulic hoses are clear. This time . .. well, this time I saw the top half of a man. He was caught between the blade and the roof, hanging over the blade, facing me."
The man's death, by "crushing injuries to the abdomen" as the medical examiner described it, occurred last Nov. 12, the day after Veterans Day. From the victim's blood-alcohol level it also appeared to the examiner that the man had elected to celebrate the holiday by getting drunk.
A crumpled copy of an Army discharge paper in his pocket identified him: Gregory DeGregorio.
It said he was born July 15, 1947, which made him 45 when he was killed. He was drafted July 25, 1967, at age 20. It gave his home as Philadelphia though his draft board was in Camden, N.J., just across the Delaware River. It said he had served in Vietnam for seven months and 17 days in 1968, was wounded and awarded the Combat Infantryman Badge and the Purple Heart. When he was discharged, Aug. 13, 1969, his home was in Colorado Springs, Colo. That was 23 years ago.
That should be more than enough information to find someone to notify of his death. It was not.
In nearly a year since that morning of horror in the paint store parking lot the authorities were unable to find a single relative of Gregory DeGregorio and have quit searching.
No one claimed his body. The Veterans of Foreign Wars saw to his burial at the National Cemetery in Bushnell, Fla. They provided an honor guard, a firing squad, a bugler and a flag for the coffin. No one claimed the flag.
Why this anonymity? Did not Gregory DeGregorio have a life?
Had he not, as the poet said of the dead of another war, "short days ago lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, loved and been loved?" What happened? At what point did Gregory DeGregorio become nobody?
A larger question arises time and again in reconstructing his ill-starred life:
How can a citizen of a society so dedicated to forms and registries and monitors and tests and back-ups and disks and tapes and chips and safety nets somehow slip so many times through the whole fail-safe maze? How many times can a person be overlooked? Was the fact that this life ended in a Dumpster - literally thrown away - symbolic?
Who was Gregory DeGregorio?
The secretary of veterans affairs says homeless veterans number 250,000 on any given night. Of those, about half are, like DeGregorio, middle-aged veterans of the Vietnam War.
We see them sleeping on grates, drinking under bridges, pushing wobbly shopping carts up alleys, nameless vagrants whose mere visibility is disconcerting. But each of them also has a discharge paper with a name on it and those names are more numerous by far than the names on the memorial wall. The homeless of the Vietnam War outnumber the fallen.
The search for the life that once was Gregory DeGregorio turns that melancholy statistic into a human tragedy.
He had a life, all right, tragic long before its tragic end.
His story is not a Greek tragedy but an American one, not the life of an epic hero brought to ignominy but of an ordinary man left at last without dignity or spirit or significance. He became by popular definition a derelict, a flawed scrap of human flotsam. The pity is he might have been anyone.
He was born in Philadelphia and baptized 10 weeks later at Annunciation Church on South 10th Street, the spiritual anchor of a neighborhood where they still hear confessions in Italian. His parents, Frank and Mary DeGregorio, named the boy Gregory John. He was their only child.
His father was a large, friendly, 35-year-old veteran of World War II, a tilesetter by trade. Around the union hall they called him Big Frank. Mary was five years younger and according to friends as gregarious and optimistic as her husband. Both doted on their son.
During the postwar construction boom the family moved to Wildwood, N.J., a seashore community where work was plentiful. Gregory entered first-grade at St. Ann's parochial school.
When the boy was ready for second grade, though, the DeGregorios had moved to Haddon Heights, N.J., a quiet town with good schools and only a stone's throw from the old stamping grounds in Philadelphia. The house was a red brick Cape Cod on a leafy street in an established neighborhood near the parish school, St. Rose of Lima, where Gregory enrolled.
"He was a very good student, remarkably good," says the current principal, Carolyn Miller, "B-plus or better all the way through eighth grade."
A good enough student, in fact, to be accepted at Bishop Eustace High in nearby Pennsauken, an elite Catholic prep school for boys. Its academic standards were rigorous, its dress code required a jacket and tie.
Gregory DeGregorio, at 14, would seem to fit right in.
In scholastic placement tests, measured against national norms, he scored in the 97th percentile (verbal) and 86th (math). His IQ was 126, exceptionally high. He qualified easily for the honors-level program and, as expected, breezed through his first year with B's and higher - even got an 84 in Latin-I, the bane of many freshmen. He did as well the first half of his sophomore year.
Then, for reasons unexplained, he left Eustace High and enrolled for the second semester in the public high school in Haddon Heights.
His grades plummeted.
He was retested. He scored, astonishingly, in the 98th percentile in biology - yet he flunked biology. He scored in the 80th percentile in math - and flunked math. He squeezed out D's in his other three subjects.
Over the following summer, 1963, Gregory turned 16. At that age it was within the law to drop out of school. When classes resumed that September Gregory did just that. Reason for withdrawal: "Indifference."
Indifference was only a symptom. Gregory DeGregorio's real problem was not diagnosed until after he was wounded in Vietnam. Doctors discovered he suffered from chronic schizophrenia.
Schizophrenia, the psychiatrists tell us, is a disorder of the brain, perhaps a chemical imbalance.
It is not unusual for a young person's personality to change suddenly and without warning. Typically, he or she becomes withdrawn, tells of responding to voices, behaves in bizarre ways. A tendency to schizophrenia, they say, may be inherited but something has to happen to set it loose.
Only about one-third of those with the disease suffer from the type known as chronic schizophrenia, which is not now curable but in some patients can be controlled by drugs.
No records have turned up that say the onset of Gregory DeGregorio's illness occurred at midterm of his sophomore year, but in rapid order after that he underwent experiences that by any reckoning had to be mentally traumatic.
About a month after his 18th birthday his mother died of a second stroke, dropped dead on the kitchen floor. Not four months later his father had a heart attack and dropped dead on the job.
A notation by the undertaker, John Healey, says the arrangements for the second burial were made "by Frank's son, Gregory." Was there no one else to handle that wrenching task?
A few days after Frank's funeral a next-door neighbor, Helen Dobrucki, noticed a woman cleaning windows at the DeGregorio's house. She said she was Frank's sister, from Philadelphia. Mrs. Dobrucki remembers their conversation.
"I told her," said Mrs. Dobrucki, "how strange I thought it was that Gregory did not resemble either his mother or father. They were both large and very dark. Gregory was rather slight, you see, and a redhead."
"She said to me, `Oh, Gregory was adopted at birth.' That was the first I had heard of that."
Ten weeks later Gregory was driving the family car, now his car, in the adjoining town of Woodlynne and struck a 14-year-old boy on a bicycle. The lad, Earl McQuarry, died four hours later. It was deemed an accident; there were no charges.
But when the police talked to Gregory he told them a wild story about having been beaten by three boys. The police saw no evidence of it but noted his "strange behavior" in the report.
Ten days after his 20th birthday, on July 25, 1967, he was drafted.
At the time, Gregory was staying in Philadelphia with his aunt, now dead, the woman who had come to clean the house after his parents' deaths. She lived in a three-story tenement kitty-cornered from the old church where Gregory was baptized.
But his draft board was in Camden, N.J., and that is where he boarded the bus to Fort Holabird, Md., for basic training.
There is no record of what sort of bizarre behavior he might have shown during the three-hour ride. But there is a record that when the bus arrived the MPs grabbed the new recruit. He passed his first night of Army life in the stockade.
After basic training he took a light weapons infantry course at Fort Polk, La., and, on the record at least, managed to stay out of Army trouble but before shipping out to Vietnam he was arrested in the town of Clementon, N.J., for breaking and entering. Thus he spent part of his last leave home in the Camden County jail.
Then, Vietnam. He arrived New Year's Day 1968. Within two weeks he was in the field.
Nearly 11 million Americans served in the military during the Vietnam era of 1964-75. Their service records are stored at the National Records Center in St. Louis. Not Gregory DeGregorio's. His service record is missing.
It was removed from the files and not put back - removed for a reason so commonplace the clerks note it in shorthand: "Homeless vet request." It means somebody needs a copy of his Form DD214, the identification that qualifies him for treatment at a VA hospital, the document found on DeGregorio's body.
Soldiers regard combat as a defining moment. Not fame or wealth or any other reward in life brings the same sense of self-worth, they say, as the knowledge that when called they answered, and measured up.
So no record remains of Gregory DeGregorio's moment of pride, of the battles he fought, the shoulder patch he wore, the guidon he followed in parade. Once again, left out.
His medical records, a VA file 3-inches thick, are of course private, their contents sealed from the merely curious. But every citizen tends to accumulate enough bureaucratic ink on records that are public so that we still can piece together some things about this unknown soldier.
After six months in the field, on July 17, DeGregorio arrived on a stretcher at the 3rd Field Hospital near Saigon bleeding from his stomach. A shrapnel wound. They patched it, leaving a jagged scar.
But they did not send him back to his own infantry outfit. Instead they assigned him to a security unit in Saigon. There, by the only observation available, "DeGregorio sort of went berserk." Four days later, at a hospital in Japan, the diagnosis came down: chronic schizophrenia.
So they sent him to Valley Forge General Hospital, a former Army infirmary near the hallowed camping ground outside Philadelphia where America's first combat infantrymen suffered, and measured up.
By that time the development of anti-psychotic drugs had allowed many mental patients to be released - "deinstitutionalized," as the policy was called. It was meant to curb abuses at asylums where people had been held against their wills or wrongly committed by others, but the policy had a downside. It presumed the released patients would have a regular doctor and a family or some community support system to look after them, see that they took their medicine.
So in 1963 President Kennedy signed a bill calling for 2,000 community mental health centers by 1980 but to this day only 768 have been built. The VA, for its part, has only 27 residences where mental patients can get live-in treatment.
Dr. Robert Rosenbeck, who evaluates VA homelessness programs (which didn't exist until 1987), says lack of support in the first year after discharge had led more directly to homelessness than wartime experiences.
And Gregory DeGregorio, officially at least, had no family at all.
So the Army transferred him from Valley Forge to an infantry regiment at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs. His soldiering days were over. He had time on his hands.
His drinking - or at least that's what was blamed - led to a brawl in town and 15 days in the post stockade. Finally, two years and 19 days after he entered the Army, he was discharged. Honorably.
He took his mustering out pay and rented an apartment on South Union Boulevard in a complex of two four-story buildings called Lakeview. Its 64 apartments, each with a small balcony, offer a view of either Prospect Lake or Pike's Peak. Today it caters to retired people; back then, mostly to young couples.
This was where Gregory DeGregorio brought his bride. Her name was Elizabeth. She was a Colorado woman but they went back to New Jersey for the wedding, in a church in Oaklyn he knew from boyhood. The old priest who performed the ceremony has no recollection of them. "There were so many of them, just back from Vietnam," he said. "It was so long ago."
The marriage didn't last. At length Elizabeth ran from him and instructed the VA not to reveal to Gregory her whereabouts or the whereabouts of their two children. (Later a second wife and child would make the same request. Both requests shall be respected, as well as the names.)
For six years after his wedding, though, Gregory DeGregorio had a family and a life of some stability. He apparently took his medicine. He stayed out of trouble. He got a job. Like his father before him he became a tilesetter. He worked for a Denver company doing contract work at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.
He was not, however, free of his demons.
When DeGregorio was discharged from the Army the VA determined that his illness was service connected. That made him eligible for financial help based on a formula that presumes to judge how much is lost of a person's ability to function normally. The calculation in DeGregorio's case was 30 percent, which translated to $240 a month.
For the rest of his life he picked up that monthly check at homeless shelters, Traveler's Aid stations, soup kitchens, mail drops from coast to coast. Until close to the end he had little contact with the VA except to notify it of changes of address. During a two-year spell in San Diego he changed his mail drop nine times.
A popular haunt among San Diego's homeless is Ocean Beach, a seashore haven that boasts a tolerant attitude toward "alternative lifestyles." Its attractions include fortified wine, cigarettes sold singly and one of the biggest fishing piers on the California coast to sleep under.
At Ocean Beach, Gregory met Valerie. She was a year younger and, like Gregory, a schizophrenic. The coincidence is not so startling. Some estimates say that schizophrenics account for as many as half the homeless in America. Valerie, too, was prone to occasional outbursts of violence. In fact, her mother, Marjorie Whelan, a widow, still has a restraining order against her and an answering machine in case she phones.
"It's so sad," Mrs. Whelan said. "So sad. But I stopped crying a long time ago. I had to."
Gregory and Valerie were married. Valerie's mother, despite her misgivings, gave them a house when Valerie became pregnant. The state took custody of the baby, a girl, six weeks after she was born on July 18, 1982. Mrs. Whelan sold the house.
Gregory and Valerie returned to Ocean Beach and soon parted. Valerie was never notified of his death.
Gregory wandered up to San Francisco.
For the next five years he landed in jails in and around that city at least 15 times - resisting arrest, lodging without consent, possession, prowling, drunkenness, and a habitual offense, running out on the bill at some fleabag or other. He took a brief vacation in May of 1985 to visit the jail in Miami Beach (drunk and disorderly) and in 1987 the one in Reno., Nev., (trespassing) and finally wandered back to San Diego.
This time he made his base the shady piers of Mission Beach, just north of Ocean Beach. And he changed his name. He now called himself Michael Wells but the residents of Mission Beach knew him as The Swan.
Last year, Gregory Degregorio drifted off to Florida.
First things first. When he arrived Feb. 5 Gregory mailed a card to the VA changing his address from a mail drop in San Diego to 4229 Gulf Blvd., Suite 303, St. Petersburg, Fla.
The "suite" was a box number at Lee Massey's Easy Mail service where Gregory would be receiving his $240 VA check. He gave Massey $10 rent for one month. Massey was fascinated by Gregory's signature, as was everyone who saw it. It was, indeed, as elegant as John Hancock's.
Often, to save on paperwork, the cops would toss Gregory and other outdoor drinkers in their cruiser and dump them out at the next town up, Treasure Island, where it was legal to drink on the beach.
He was a regular patron at a one-story blue frame house downtown, the center of Advocates for Shelter/Action Policy run by a former St. Petersburg policeman, Jerry Styles, and his wife, Camille, a couple with astonishing patience and compassion.
"Greg would come in the morning for coffee and doughnuts, maybe take a shower," Jerry Styles recalled. "He was never dirty. His clothes were not the best, secondhand but clean. He never looked run down or scuzzy or shaggy.
"But I knew he had mental problems. We feed about 80 men in the morning. They sit at the picnic tables out back or stand in groups, but Greg stayed apart. He sat by himself on a bench against the house as far as he could get from the others. He was totally quiet, just sat and stared. He was never loud or violent. In fact he was quite docile. He was not unfriendly, just indifferent. He didn't choose to mix."
Indifferent?
"That's what he was," said Styles, "indifferent."
For 30 years, then, Gregory DeGregorio's indifference toward society was met by society's indifference toward him. The schools, the Army, the VA, policemen, lawyers, doctors - how could it happen that all along the line for three decades no person, no system, caught the signals?
One day in September Jerry Styles pointed out Gregory to Kevin Klockworthy, an outreach worker at the Bay Pines VA Medical Center. Clearly, Styles told him, Gregory was a mental case. Klockworthy persuaded him to go to the hospital. There is no evidence that Gregory had visited a VA hospital since he left Colorado.
Klockworthy faxed a request to the Army Records Center in St. Louis for DeGregorio's DD214. The center might have lost the file but did send the form.
On Oct. 27 Gregory went to Bay Pines, was given a patient identification card, and screened.
DeGregorio was sent to a specialist in alcoholism. He was not treated for his mental disorder.
The next day Gregory stopped by the shelter and told Jerry Styles he was going to the East Coast. Maybe Miami, he told Jerry, maybe find some work cleaning up after Hurricane Andrew.
Gregory didn't go to Miami. Instead he bought a $25 Greyhound bus ticket to Daytona Beach.
On Nov. 10 Gregory bought a bus ticket back to St. Petersburg. But he didn't use it. The day was warm and breezy, the evening cool, 70-degrees, a full moon lit the night sky, the hunters' moon, and the next day was a holiday, Veterans Day. He decided to stay in Daytona Beach.
So on the following night, Nov. 11, he crawled into the Dumpster behind the paint store on Seagrave Street.
He was wearing a black baseball cap from Froggy's Saloon, one of the joints where he had celebrated Veterans Day. It was on the beach side of the city across the river and about a mile's hike from Seagrave Street. He had his Walkman for company. He had $61 in his pocket, his DD214 form and his VA patient identification card.
Verlin Bell arrived with his garbage truck shortly after 5 the next morning.
As soon as he glanced backward, saw Gregory's mangled body, the grotesque look on his face, he stopped the compressor blade and screamed into his radio for somebody at his office to please God call 911.
Bell was still muscling the huge steel blade back with his hands, tugging and praying, when the medical emergency team arrived but it was already too late.
Gregory DeGregorio was pronounced dead at 5:56 a.m. Thursday, Nov. 12, 1992.
Members of the color guard from VFW Post 3282 in Port Orange, just outside Daytona Beach, piled into three cars on the following Thursday, Nov. 19, for the two-hour drive across the state to the National Cemetery in Bushnell, northwest of Tampa.
They included the commander, Ed Barth, a retired major, and Ed's wife, and six graying former soldiers whose common bond - whose only bond with Gregory DeGregorio - was having fought in an American uniform on foreign soil.
Mimi Barth accepted the folded flag. When it became obvious no one would claim it the VFW donated the flag to the cemetery.
Anyone who would care to visit the grave should be forewarned:
In the cemetery's alphabetical visitor's directory Gregory's name is not there. Like his missing Army record, it has been misfiled. Someone divided his last name, DeGregorio, into two words and you will find him listed under the G's. His grave is number 573 in section 104.
He rests in a sweet and silent bivouac of the dead 10 ranks back from the smooth curve of a blacktop road and 15 files east of two live oak trees that shade his tombstone in the late afternoon.
His epitaph reads vertically in eight lines:
GREGORY
DeGREGORIO
PVT
US ARMY
VIETNAM
JULY 15 1947
NOV 12 1992
PURPLE HEART
by CNB