THE MAIL BEGAN PILING UP outside a brick bungalow on South Troy Street the week before Christmas in 2016. An 87-year-old man lived inside, alone. Everyone on the block knew Joseph Stancak, the slight figure pushing his two-wheeled shopping cart to Pete’s Fresh Market on Kedzie, walking down the street with his hands clasped behind his back, or cutting his grass with an old Sunbeam electric mower. As one of the last white holdouts on a Gage Park block that was nearly all Latino, Stancak stood out. His new neighbors looked after his well-being, though, shoveling his walk after a heavy snow.
On the morning of Monday, December 19, postal carrier Crystal Hayes noticed that Stancak hadn’t brought in his mail from Friday or Saturday. She asked a firefighter who lived a few doors down to check on him. There was no response to the doorbell, so the firefighter called the police, who also got no answer. The mail continued to pile up, and the firefighter called again. When officers returned on Friday, they noticed a strange odor coming from the house, so they called the fire department to request a forced entry. After firefighters broke a window, Stancak’s next-door neighbor Jesse Guzman climbed through and unlocked the back door. Guzman knew Stancak as well as anyone but had never been inside his home. There was no heat on, even though the temperature was 37 degrees that day, and no electricity.
An hour later, the officers came by Guzman’s garage to report that Stancak was dead. They had found him in the bathtub, wearing a sweater and a jacket.
Stancak had once lived with two older sisters in the 1,600-square-foot house, but Frances died in 2002, and Helen in 2006. He had no wife, no children, no close friends, so no one ever came to call. At the end of Joe Stancak’s life, death was his only visitor. Nobody knows exactly when it came, though, or in what guise. On Stancak’s death certificate, the date is listed as “found December 23, 2016,” and the cause as “hypertensive and arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease,” but his neighbors wonder whether living without heat helped do him in.
Guzman returned to Stancak’s house a few days later to turn off the water. He walked through
