Here comes summer

[Photo by Melanie Neichin yesterday via East Village Corner]

Onetime Tompkins Square Park crusty found murdered in Virginia

[Photo by Steven Hirsch, reprinted with permission]

The Local East Village brings word that Robert Edwards Dyck — known as Yardsale around the Park — was found murdered last month in Virginia.

Per the Richmond Times-Dispatch from Nov. 23:

The beating death of a homeless man whose body was discovered last week near a Henrico County railyard ended his companion's dreams of a happy life together.

Robert Edwards Dyck, 37, and Lucille Obarzanek, a 28-year-old University of Vermont graduate, were hopping freight trains south from Pennsylvania to New Orleans when Dyck turned up missing and then dead, the victim of blunt-force injuries to his head and chest.

"We were going to try to make a go of it. To get to Louisiana and find work and raise a family," Obarzanek said yesterday.

Dyck and Obarzanek had been in the Richmond area for about three weeks, she said, living in a shantytown near the Acca Yard that the train-jumpers call Valhalla.

But sharing a tarp roof, a fire pit, and a pine-tree-studded junkyard of garbage and empty beer and wine bottles, Obarzanek said, were two men who carried ominous nicknames, "Satan" and "Roofless."

The two men — Samuel E. Gase, 32, aka Satan, and Brandon Thomas Geissler, 21, aka Roofless — appeared in Henrico General District Court yesterday and are being held without bond. Both are charged with voluntary manslaughter in Dyck's death.

As Yardsdale told Steven Hirsch's Crustypunks blog:

I'll probably die of alcoholism. I only drink beer, but I don't know. I'm not going to guarantee my demise. Sometimes I don't feel so right here. Thirty seven. Yeah it's hard core man. No I'm just getting started. The guy that give me my name is like in his sixties and he's got a freight train tattooed on his forehead. I'm just getting started. I ride the sunset. This is my first time in New York but I mainly ride the sunset which is LA to New Orleans.

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