Using a brown Magic Marker, Bentley Yazzie draws an elaborate eagle with wings spread wide on a cardboard sign he’ll hold while standing on a corner in downtown Denver. Yazzie, an enrolled member of the Navajo nation, says he won’t use his banner to beg for booze, insisting that he steers homeless friends from alcohol and abstains himself.

But the more he speaks, the more truth leaks out: Two female friends, also homeless, whom he counseled not to drink, talked him into consuming alcohol. In a five-year period, booze led to his arrest six times for assault and seven times for public intoxication.

Drinking, he says, killed his two friends, including Marietta Porcupine, who died Nov. 7.

“I tried to take care of them,” he said.

Porcupine is one of 677 homeless people who ended up in the Denver coroner’s office in the past dozen years. Most arrived there as a consequence of drug and alcohol abuse. They came in body bags of all sizes. One died just minutes after birth; one was 90 years old.

They were transported to a basement laboratory at 660 Bannock St. at the average age of 46, according to the database maintained by Michelle Weiss-Samaras, spokeswoman for the Denver coroner’s office.

That’s roughly 34 years less than the average Colorado resident can expect to live.

The tally doesn’t even count all of the homeless who died in Denver — just those who were unattended at the time of death, the ones found in alleys or under bridges or those under a doctor’s care for less than a day before death, said Weiss-Samaras, who has been keeping the database for decades.

It also doesn’t count people living in temporary housing such as motels.

Weiss-Samaras has a special attachment to homeless people dating back to when her father was a Denver cop. She recalls going to a police station on cold winter nights and seeing men sitting on the floor in the warm station for survival.

She feeds data about the homeless to agencies including Denver Human Services and the Colorado Coalition of the Homeless to help them make policy decisions about addressing the needs of the homeless.

Dr. Jennifer Perlman, the coalition’s director of outreach and engagement services, said the coroner’s-office data confirm what she has learned anecdotally by interviewing homeless people.

They grow up in dangerous homes, she said. They cope by self-medicating with cocaine and whiskey that take a toll.

“They become homeless when there is not a single person they can turn to,” Perlman said.

According to Weiss-Samaras’ data, 30 percent of the homeless die of natural causes.

The most common way they die is by accident. They stumble into streets and are struck by cars — 46 homeless have died in traffic accidents since 2000 — or fall into a body of water and drown, as happened to 16 homeless in the past 12 years,

according to the records.

Living where people are not expected to live can be dangerous. A homeless friend of Yazzie’s was sleeping behind a trash bin when a truck lifted and emptied the bin and then set it back down on top of his friend, smashing his legs.

According to coroner’s-office records, 13 homeless people were crushed and fatally injured in mishaps, including tumbling headfirst down river banks into rocky riverbeds.

Twenty people have frozen to death on Denver streets since 2000, including Adolph Gonzales, 73, whose body was found Feb. 7 on the south side of Lakewood Gulch. Another 33 died of various strains of pneumonia.

Many homeless people lose hope, Perlman said, and kill themselves. The database lists 28 suicides, but Perlman suspects many more intentionally take lethal amounts of drugs.

According to the coroner’s- office database, 171 homeless people overdosed on cocaine, methamphetamines, heroin or a lethal cocktail of drugs and alcohol. Another 26 died of alcohol intoxication and 78 of chronic alcoholism.

Yazzie said fights on the street are inevitable. Two weeks ago, a homeless man wanted to steal his grocery cart that he keeps packed with tarps, backpacks, sleeping bags, coats, blankets and a water jug.

“You might get in a fight and get stabbed, just to keep your buggy,” he said as he flexed the swollen knuckles in his right hand.

The cause of death for 43 homeless people in Denver since 2000 has been homicide.

It’s frequently difficult to tell exactly how the homeless die because they have a potentially lethal amount of drugs in their system and a gash on their head from falling, Weiss-Samaras said.

“Did they die of an overdose and the fall was incidental or vice versa?” she said.

Coroners couldn’t tell how 60 homeless people died, so they classified their deaths as “undetermined.”

Kirk Mitchell: 303-954-1206, kmitchell@denverpost.com or twitter.com/kmitchelldp