LEWISTON – The man’s name is Avner David Ring and watching him move about, one might suspect he was simply drunk.

He weaves from one side to the other, and staggers when he tries to take a step. His clothes are covered with grime and his own waste. His words are garbled and it’s hard to tell if he understands his situation at all.

Avner is 70 years old, sickly and homeless. For the past several nights, he’s been spending all his hours tucked in behind some hedges next to a Pine Street building. He sleeps on a concrete slab under blankets provided by volunteers. He eats food brought over from the Trinity Jubilee Center.

“He has bilateral cataracts so he can’t see,” said Calvin Dube, former director of the center who continues to work the homeless. “He could not see his food last night when I took it to him. I had to put his hand on everything so he’d know it was there. He could not get up.”

There’s no indication Avner has problems with liquor or drugs, but the man does have serious breathing problems, Dube said. He’s dehydrated, grossly underweight and he’s vulnerable.

“This is probably the worst homeless situation I’ve ever seen,” said Dube, who has been volunteering to help the homeless for more than two decades. “The risk of him getting an infectious disease, first of all, is high. He couldn’t get up yesterday or the day before to go to Trinity. He was too weak. He’s lost a significant amount of weight in the last two weeks.”

What’s more, Avner has become unable to perform the most basic tasks required to take care of himself.

“He has a collection of checks from Social Security that he keeps under his pillow,” Dube said. “He doesn’t know what to do with them. He can’t just take them to the credit union because he wouldn’t be able to walk there. He’s so disconnected from reality that he can’t take care of himself.”

Earlier this week, Avner’s caseworker got involved and paramedics were sent to Pine Street to take him to the hospital. He was treated at St. Mary’s Regional Medical Center for more than 24 hours and he was examined by a psychiatrist.

“The psychiatrist thought he was clear enough to be released,” Dube said, “so they put him in an ambulance and brought them back here.”

Avner was declared sound enough to care for himself, but Dube insists that the man’s health is deteriorating by the day. Every time Dube went to Pine Street to bring Avner more food or a heavier blanket, he expected to find Avner dead.

Little is known about the man. He’s from New York, Dube has learned, but came to Maine roughly six months ago. He has been homeless for all of those months.

Avner has no family up here, but on Wednesday he told a news photographer that he has “people” down in Florida, and that he would like to head south to see them. Public records show that Avner lived for a time in Key West, Florida.

Sometime Thursday morning, the paramedics went back to Pine Street. Again they loaded Avner onto a gurney and again took him to the hospital. Later on Thursday, Avner was still being evaluated.

Dube said he was staying in touch with Avner’s caseworker and others from the adult protective services. He had also been in contact with the administration at St. Mary’s, doing his best to urge them to hang on to Avner.

“He needs to be in a nursing home or some kind of facility,” Dube said. “He can’t be on his own.”

In spite of Avner’s many woes, Dube said, there have been glimpses of lucidity and even humor.

“The first thing he said to me,” Dube said, “is to ask what kind of name is Calvin.”

Avner also requested tuna at one point because he knows he is malnourished and could use the protein. But those moments are fleeting, Dube said. For the most part, Avner is as bewildered as he is disheveled.

“He definitely isn’t coherent enough to make the kinds of decisions to take care of himself,” Dube said.

Nor is Avner the only homeless person out there — Dube said he witnessed more homelessness in Lewiston this summer than he has ever seen before.

He’d like to convince the City Council to make moves toward opening a night shelter for people like Avner. A place like Hope Haven Gospel Mission would not work for a man like Avner, Dube said, because he would never be able to make it up the long flight of stairs to the residences.

By nightfall Thursday, Avner’s meager belongings were still scattered across the area along Pine Street he has been calling home for the better part of a week. There’s a box of cereal, overturned and spilling its contents onto the concrete. There’s a grungy pair of jeans, a soiled blanked and a twisted sleeping bag sitting amid an array of litter and waste.

Avner himself wasn’t there, and while there were no available details about his current situation, Dube took it as a hopeful sign.

Dube, himself a former prison inmate, has been advocating for both the homeless and newly freed prisoners since going to work at the Jubilee soup kitchen in 1996. A former registered nurse, he says his expertise in that career was in mental illness.

People like Avner, he said, can easily slip through the cracks of the medical system and perish on the streets. The problem, according to a mental health crisis worker not involved in Avner’s case, is that the adult protective system can be a slow process.

For an adult to be involuntarily committed, or “blue papered,” to a facility, a crisis worker and medical doctor must first agree that the patient is not able to care for himself — that he is a danger to himself or others. The decision would then go to a judge. In a case where a person is sick and not taking care of himself but not necessarily due to mental illness or substance abuse, adult protective services may step in to make the recommendation for involuntary committal.

Dube was avidly hoping Thursday that such a recommendation might be made for Avner this time around. That would at least get one vulnerable man off the street and into the kind of care he needs.

“I’m not unrealistic,” he said. “I know that homelessness has been around since the beginning of time. But such acute homelessness; such acute medical and psychiatric issues. All I can think of is my father. What if this was my father?”

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