Thirteen people have died of hypothermia in Chicago this winter, most of them outside. Sterling Coleman was unusual: he froze to death in his own home.
Coleman never married or had any children, and the remaining family he did have he kept at some distance. “My brother was a private person who didn’t tell us anything,” says his sister Rosetta Craig. “He always told us he was OK. He said we didn’t have to visit.” (She declined to comment further.)
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“I never had one conversation with him,” says Leroy Robinson, who lived across from Coleman for about 20 years. Although he’d pass Coleman on the street every now and then, “there was never no ‘hi’ or ‘how are you’ or ‘good morning.’”
They bonded over sports. Back when Billy Williams played for the Cubs, they’d ride the el together to Wrigley Field, and before the Bulls won their first championship, when they could still afford scalpers’ tickets, they’d go to the Chicago Stadium and marvel at Michael Jordan. Eventually they had to settle for watching him on TV at Coleman’s sister’s house. “After Michael left, that was hard,” says Hart. “Michael, that’s all he’d talk about.”
It had been years since Coleman had worked a steady job. The steel industry began collapsing in the mid-70s. International competition, industry restructuring, economic decline, and an increasing demand for alternatives to steel, such as aluminum and plastic, led to massive layoffs. The effect on the southeast side was devastating. Unemployment jumped from 4 to 11 percent between 1970 and 1980; by 1982 the South Chicago Development Commission was estimating it had reached 35 percent.
He put his finds in a shopping cart and pushed them two and a half miles to a recycling center at 83rd and Vincennes, where he exchanged them for about 40 cents a pound. Because his van was now permanently parked in his backyard, Hart offered to drive him there. “I said, ‘Let me know when you want to take them–I can raise my trunk up,’” Hart says. “Sterling says, ‘Naw, I be picking up cans on my way to and from.’” Though Coleman made a couple trips to the center each week, no one there knew his name.
In all the years he’d known Coleman, Hart says, his porch “is as far as I went.” Had he gotten further, he would’ve been shocked at what he saw. Coleman had covered “every inch” of wall space in the house with blankets and carpeting. Officer Curtis Hinkle, one of the first on the scene, says the makeshift insulation blocked even light switches and the front door, which had to be pried open. The house was dark and cold and eerily empty, with a striking absence of personal effects. Hinkle saw no furniture, no family photos, no space heaters, not even a kitchen sink.
