EVANSVILLE – The man who was found frozen to death next to a Downtown Evansville building earlier this week lived on the city streets at least off and on since the 1970s, records show.
Marvin Ray Beck, 67, died from “hypothermia due to environmental exposure,” the Vanderburgh County Coroner’s office ruled after an autopsy Tuesday.
According to Central Dispatch records, someone doing construction work spotted Beck sleeping outside the Hulman Building Garage in the 100 block of Northwest Third Street on Monday morning and called 911.
“It don’t look good,” they said. “It don’t look like he’s moved since all last night.”
Covered in snow and amid frigid temperatures and subzero wind chills, Beck was unresponsive when authorities arrived. He was later pronounced dead.
An Evansville Courier reporter interviewed Beck about living in his car as far back as 1978, newspaper archives show. And Zac Heronemus, executive director for homeless outreach Aurora Evansville, confirmed Beck was one of the handful of the approximately 50 chronically unhoused Evansville residents who have lived that way for years.
“I’d say 10 to 15 of our unhoused people are significant long-timers,” he said.
Beck was “barred” from several locations Downtown, according to Evansville police records. Heronemus didn’t know if any of those extended to area shelters – the Evansville Rescue Mission declined to comment to the Courier & Press, citing confidentiality – but either way, none of that would have mattered in such extreme cold, he said.
On “white flag” nights, anyone is let in to either the Evansville Rescue Mission or United Caring Services regardless of their status, he said. A Rescue Mission Facebook post stated they’d been averaging 191 residents a night over the last few days.
Ahead of the plummeting temperatures, Aurora workers canvassed the city to provide supplies and encourage any unhoused person to seek shelter. They spoke with several people, Heronemus said, but he wasn’t sure if Beck was one of them.
Who was Marvin Ray Beck?
In August 1978, the Evansville Courier was compiling a special section on the city that read like a case for tourism. Amid stories boasting a “rosy” business outlook, one Evansville reporter was tasked with asking everyday citizens what they “liked” about the city.
A 22-year-old Huntingburg native named Marvin Beck offered a different answer than anyone else. He described Evansville simply as a place where he could park his 1964 Pontiac Catalina and “not be bothered.”
That privacy was paramount, he said, because he lived in his car. Ever since he lost his job a few months before, he’d been sleeping in the backseat.
“I’m out of toothpaste, but I do have a bottle of Peppermint Schnapps for mouthwash,” he joked to the reporter.
Public records don’t list much more about Beck. He appears as a survivor in a few family obituaries, and a LexisNexis search unearthed an old address on Louisiana Street and an active voter registration.
On Sept. 3, an EPD officer found him sleeping on the sidewalk in the 300 block of Main Street. According to the probable cause affidavit, he was eventually arrested and charged with trespassing for reportedly moving a barrier and trying to enter a construction zone. Two days later, a judge sentenced him to 180 days in jail, which would have kept him off the street for six months.
The sentence was suspended, though, on the condition he stay away from the barred address. On Monday, he was found dead a little more than a block away.