He was known to neighbours as the man with the van covered in pennies.

Julio Fernandez had blanketed the rusty vehicle in copper coins himself, gluing them in neat rows, one by one, over the chipped brown paint.

“All over the back, all over the door — pennies, pennies, pennies, pennies, pennies. A million pennies,” said Tony Efzel, a former neighbour, who remembers the pennymobile well. Because how could you not?

The van, which sat for years in the parking lot at Arleta Manor — a lowrise Toronto Community Housing building for seniors in North York — may well have been the artist’s proudest piece of work.

But the van is gone now, and so is he.

Fernandez is the unnamed “Mr. B” from the explosive report on the treatment of seniors in public housing, released by Toronto’s ombudsman last week. According to the findings, Mr. B was evicted from his TCHC apartment last year after falling into rent arrears, spent two weeks bunking at his ex-spouse’s house — an arrangement that quickly became “untenable” — and then checked himself into a hospital, where he had a heart attack and died a week later. He was in his late 60s.

Ombudsman Fiona Crean’s office could not confirm Mr. B’s identity because she is bound under an oath of secrecy not to disclose such details. But friends, neighbours and acquaintances identified Fernandez as the man who, as described in the report, was evicted from Arleta Manor last March and died three weeks later. Crean’s report suggests the eviction was one of the factors that led to the heart attack.

His story, in some ways, echoes that of Al Gosling — particularly since they both lived in, and were ultimately evicted from, the same building. Gosling, 81, slept in the stairwell at Arleta Manor after he was sent a series of rent arrears notices and then evicted in 2009. Frail and vulnerable, he was taken to a shelter, where he picked up an infection that eventually killed him.

Crean’s investigation found TCHC is still needlessly evicting seniors, despite promises made after a 2010 judicial inquiry into the Gosling case. Her report was debated at city council on Wednesday, and councillors will vote on several proposals related to the report Thursday.

At a recent weekday afternoon birthday party in Arleta Manor’s main-floor common room, residents tapped their feet and bobbed their heads to mariachi music blaring out of a portable CD player. Above the happy trumpeting, neighbours shared the few details they could recall about the man most knew only as Julio: the man with the penny van.

“Julio?” said a woman with long, grey hair, knitting in a corner. “He was an artist. He made beautiful pictures. He could paint a portrait of you and you’d think you were looking in a mirror.”

But the knitting woman didn’t know him well. “Talk to Lance,” she said.

Around the corner and down the hall, Lance Ryan opened the door to his first-floor apartment and squinted into the fluorescent light. Yes, he said, he knew Julio. Fernandez lived just a few doors down and once painted a portrait of Ryan’s roommate, Sheila Bouzane, with her pet rabbit, Mrs. Hazel. Ryan pulled the framed painting out of a closet and held it up to the light: a woman with a curtain of blond hair, smirking; the bunny wrapped in a blanket in her arms; marshmallow clouds in the background.

“He was actually quite erratic,” Ryan said, putting the painting away. “Julio wasn’t a bad guy, but if you looked at him the wrong way he’d get upset.”

Fernandez was not a sociable person, according to the people who encountered him at Arleta Manor. He didn’t attend parties in the common room with the other tenants. He appeared to have some mental health issues. He was, as one resident put it, cantankerous, paranoid and intensely private. Even friends didn’t seem to know anything about Fernandez’s family or his life before Arleta Manor. The Star couldn’t reach his ex-spouse or children.

Several residents said they felt the Fernandez situation wasn’t like that of Al Gosling, a quiet and frail man whose death spawned a public outcry. Fernandez could at times be a troublemaker, according to some tenants. He painted elaborate murals on his walls, floor and front door, which was against the building’s policy.He was very sensitive about his van, which he sometimes parked on the lawn, one tenant said.

“If anybody came to bother him about the van, he was very unhappy,” said Esther Davis, who has lived at Arleta for a decade and knew Fernandez better than most. He gave her a ring once, she said, because she was nice to him.

Davis said Fernandez made many promises to pay the rent he owed, but never did.

“If a tenant is going to live somewhere,” she said, “then they have to pay their rent.”

But the Crean investigation found that Fernandezwas in arrears of only $45 at the end of 2008. Then, early the next year, TCHC increased his rent retroactively because he was late reporting a change in income, and suddenly he owed $3,000. That’s when things began to fall apart.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Further debt piled up throughout 2009 and 2010. During that time, Fernandez made several verbal commitments to pay back the money he owed, but there was never a written agreement with TCHC, according to the report. Despite his failure to pay, TCHC didn’t make an application to the Landlord and Tenant Board until June 2011, and didn’t convene a meeting with social supports until after an eviction order was issued, the report said.

During eviction proceedings, Fernandez was supposed to undergo a capacity assessment due to concerns over his mental health, but he refused. A language barrier exacerbated communication difficulties.

By the time he was evicted, Fernandez owed nearly $10,000.

A major problem identified in the Crean report was the eviction of some vulnerable, elderly tenants without face-to-face counselling, which the investigation found was lacking in the Fernandez case.

In a statement last week, TCHC chief executive Gene Jones said he has accepted all of Crean’s recommendations and the company will work to implement them “in a timely manner.”

TCHC would not speak specifically about Fernandez, citing privacy rules, but said in an emailed statement that in arrears cases, staff make several attempts to speak to residents and bring in social supports before evicting.

“There are times, despite repeated attempts, that offered supports are refused by the resident. When this happens, we often are left with no other choice but to move ahead with eviction proceedings,” spokeswoman Sinead Canavan wrote. “When we do evict for nonpayment of rent, we work to ensure that support agencies are present at time of eviction.”

Fernandez was evicted in early March 2012. He had planned to live in his van, which by then was parked at a storage facility, and shower at a local gym. In the end, his adult children arranged for him to sleep at his ex-wife’s house while she was at work, according to the report. He had to vacate in the morning, spending his days at a local mall.

That arrangement fell apart after two weeks, and Fernandez checked himself into a hospital. He died on March 24.

Days later, one TCHC manager wrote to another who had signed off on the eviction to relay the news, informing the colleague that Fernandez had lived in the same building as Gosling, and noting there was “no ‘buzz’ with tenants about his death since he was not well known to them,” according to the report.

The Fernandez story may not be the same as Al Gosling’s, Crean said in an interview, but it’s a human story about what happens to a vulnerable man who gets evicted and has nowhere else to go.

“What an undignified way,” she said, “to end your life.”