The note reads:
Wishing you a Scary Mary Christmas
from all the folks at Billy's Antiques
Wishing you a Scary Mary Christmas
from all the folks at Billy's Antiques
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.
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.
Do you recall hearing that Giuliani's administration was briefly considering putting all the homeless people on a barge that would circle Manhattan? I remember hearing this, but of course now that I can't find any back up, it seems more like a nutty rumor than reality.
I would urge you to remind your readers to make sure they have renters' insurance, as your possesions are not covered, just the facilities. I would also say it would be a good idea to keep an envelope of important info ready to go near the fastest exit. And also, take the time to think about two possible escape routes, wherever you are.