His name was Rick, and he drank.

He spent his days on a sandstone ledge on the east side of the 16th Street Mall, outside a vacant building and next to a store where tourists satisfy their cravings for moccasins and carved buffalo heads.

For the most part, Rick didn’t bother anybody, and nobody much bothered with him.

Until he died.

In life, he was probably a source of pain for anyone who cared about him and of smirking derision for any of the thousands who passed him every day — at least among those who noticed him.

But in death, 55-year-old Richard Allen Johnson commanded attention.

“He just slumped over”

He had spent the night of June 29 as he passed countless others: sleeping in a doorway.

At 4 a.m. on the 30th, cleaning crews in their purple shirts showed up to put a morning shine on the 16th Street Mall.

They knew Johnson and his habits well enough to know he wasn’t in his regular spot, said Lyn Reed of Service Group Inc., which contracts with the Downtown Denver Business Improvement District to do mall maintenance.

“When he didn’t follow his normal routine, they knew he was in trouble,” Reed said.

At about 7 a.m., one of the workers asked Johnson to move.

Mall crews are trained, Reed said, in how to be kind to everyone — tourists, drunks, harried office workers and the homeless. So they asked Johnson to move so he wouldn’t get hosed off along with the sidewalks.

He got up, Reed said, and moved to a bench between the Corner Bakery and the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory.

And then, “he just slumped over,” Reed said.

Mall worker Lorenzo Delgado reached a gloved hand down to Johnson’s neck and felt for a pulse.

It was at that moment that Charlie Dalbec, practicing with his new camera on the mall, noticed what was happening and snapped a photograph that he later e-mailed to The Denver Post.

By the time Charlie Dalbec had clicked the shutter, Richard Johnson was dead.

Identifying the homeless

The last time homeless advocates tried to count them, on Jan. 29, 2007, they found 10,604 homeless men, women and children in metro Denver. Of those, about 8 percent, or 412, were considered chronically homeless, according to BJ Iacino of the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless. More than 90 percent of those were men.

Today, the number of chronically homeless — which means they’ve had no place to live for a year or more — may be smaller, Iacino said.

Since its 2005 launch, Denver’s Road Home estimates about 36 percent of the city’s chronic homeless have been coaxed off the streets. The coalition estimates that in 2007, 357 people got a place to live who hadn’t had one before.

Still, as 2009 opened, the Downtown Denver Partnership decided the 16th Street Mall needed special attention and “asked St. Francis Center for intense outreach,” said partnership spokeswoman Sarah Neumann.

Outreach workers at St. Francis Center, which provides shelter, food and counseling for homeless people, canvassed the mall. They identified 23 people as chronically homeless.

Rick Johnson was one of those.

Of those, four have gotten housing, Neumann said.

Rick Johnson was not one of those.

It’s not that they didn’t try, said Jim Boberschmidt, one of the St. Francis outreach workers.

“At least five or six outreach workers had invited him into housing,” Boberschmidt said. “He repeatedly turned down the offers.”

Occasionally, Johnson would agree. “But I’m not sure it wasn’t more to get us off his back,” Boberschmidt said.

Whatever his demons, Boberschmidt said, Johnson didn’t share them.

While the city’s investment — almost $60 million by the time Denver’s Road Home runs its 10-year course — in affordable housing and job counseling has helped hundreds of people leave the streets, there are some who just can’t make it. Or won’t.

Often, that stubbornness comes from a bottle, or a pill, or a mental illness, Boberschmidt said. “Unfortunately, an individual’s right overtakes our ability to bring them inside.”

Remembering the man

It didn’t take long for people who work — and live — on the mall to hear the guy they knew as Rick had died.

“He is every day here,” said Ablasse, who is from Burkina Faso and sells handbags from a cart parked along the same block that Johnson favored.

He never raised a fuss, never yelled accusations at passers-by, never mumbled or shouted anything about Bible verses and damnation.

But, Ablasse said, he always had an Einstein Bros. cup in his hand.

That’s because for as long as anybody working at Einstein’s can recall, which is about three years, Johnson was there when they unlocked the door at 5:30 a.m. every day. “Even on Christmas,” said Chris Selman, who has been a bagel slinger for more than a year.

Johnson would come in, get his coffee, then go out to his spot on the ledge.

He didn’t talk much, Selman said, but did mention that he had kids. Somewhere.

Few days passed that some tender- hearted paying customer didn’t buy Johnson a sandwich, Selman said. And there were days when he showed up clean, shaved and combed.

Boberschmidt said Johnson’s grooming kind of made him stand out among the homeless.

“He was usually a well-kept guy,” Boberschmidt said.

Until recently. “The last time I’d seen him, maybe a week before he died, he had the look of someone who’d given up,” Boberschmidt said.

On the corner of 16th Street and Tremont Place, a woman named Lovie was hawking The Voice, the weekly newspapers that chronicle homelessness.

She, too, recognized Johnson’s photo. But she didn’t know much about him.

“He never asked for money, I’ll tell you that,” Lovie said. “We think he drank.”

All that may be true, but in order to bury him, to let any relatives he might have had know that he died, the Denver medical examiner’s office needed a little more.

Unraveled life investigated

When he rolled into the medical examiner’s office that last morning in June, Johnson was wearing a black leather jacket, a blue sweat shirt, a sweater, a pair of black cargo pants, grey sweat pants and white socks.

He was also wearing a wristwatch.

Johnson had a duffle bag, and in his pockets were a comb, nail clippers, a cigarette lighter, a knife and a Christian cross.

In his wallet was $5, and, in a major stroke of luck for the coroner’s investigator, an ID card and scraps of paper with phone numbers scribbled on them.

More than 100 homeless people die each year in Denver. More often than not, they end up at the coroner’s office. Most undergo an autopsy, which costs, on average, about $2,500. Johnson’s body was autopsied. The coroner still has not determined a cause of death.

The law requires next of kin be notified when someone dies. But many homeless people have put a lot of years, miles and empty bottles — or delusions, or whatever has hold of them — between themselves and family.

With any luck, a coroner’s investigator at least has a name to start with. With a little more luck, that name’s not quite as common as Johnson.

Before he became a coroner’s investigator a decade ago, Howard Daniel was a police chief on the island of St. Croix. So it’s no surprise that one of the first places he looks for clues to a deceased person’s life is police records.

In Richard Johnson’s case, Daniel found plenty there — just not what he was looking for.

“When someone is arrested, they have the opportunity to name their next of kin,” Daniel said. “He listed none.”

Next, he tried Denver Health. Johnson had been a patient there. But once again, no family members named.

His break came from one of the names scribbled on a piece of paper that had been in Johnson’s pocket. It was a friend who lived in Denver and sometimes let Johnson spend the night at his apartment.

The friend, who declined to be interviewed, figured Johnson had been homeless for a decade.

Ten days after he took on the case, Daniel knew Johnson was from Colorado and graduated from Denver’s East High School. He had once worked as a cook, and he was married at least once. He had a brother and a sister, and he had children.

What he couldn’t say is how a life that, on paper at least, seemed to have all the right ingredients veered so irrevocably off track.

His friend’s only explanation, Daniel said, was that “he just didn’t want to pay alimony.”

Arrest records for Richard A. Johnson, born Jan. 24, 1954, fill up nine pages and date to the 1970s. The offenses are many and varied, but alcohol is the recurring theme. There are DUIs, a couple of misdemeanor domestic assaults. And as his life unraveled, his crimes reflected his plummeting status: sleeping in parks, trespassing, urinating in public. He almost never showed up in court when he was supposed to.

His last arrest was May 26.

Boberschmidt said he’d noticed Johnson’s drinking getting even worse over the past year. “I heard he was being belligerent toward cleaning people in recent weeks. That’s not his usual behavior.”

Finally claimed

Enough people die alone in Denver — at home or on the streets — to keep Daniel busy. Most of the time, he and his colleagues find someone, somewhere to claim them.

But a dozen times each year, they don’t.

When that happens, the medical examiner’s office calls on a handful of mortuaries that take turns donating services, said Michelle Weiss-Samaras, Denver’s chief deputy coroner.

For families who just can’t afford burial, there may be help from the state.

Every year, the homeless coalition hosts a candlelight vigil for men and women who died on the streets during the previous year.

Last December, volunteers read the names of 142 men and 22 women who lived and died on the streets of the Denver metropolitan area.

“A half-a-dozen times a year, I get a call or contact from a family member who maybe has Googled and found a loved one on the website,” the coalition’s Iacino said.

Sometimes they’ve been searching for years for a brother or sister, or a parent. Every time, she said, they thank her for the memorial vigil.

This year, Johnson’s name will be on that list. But at least his family won’t learn about his death by happenstance.

On July 11, Daniel called a number in Nebraska, and Johnson’s daughter answered. She said she hadn’t spoken to her father in 15 years.

Nevertheless, she was concerned about her father and grateful for the call. She’ll bury her dad.

In the meantime, Richard Johnson has a place to stay. For a few more days.

Karen Auge: 303-954-1733 or kauge@denverpost.com

Denver Post researcher Barry Osborne contributed to this report.