Issue #47, March 2, 2007

VINCENZO RICCARDI, 70

By Dan Rattiner

Last week, it was widely reported that a man living alone in Hampton Bays had sat in his living room in front of the television set last February, died, and nobody noticed. Only when a water pipe burst in a cold snap one year later did someone think to call the authorities. They came, found him and took him to the morgue.

Vincenzo Riccardi was born in 1937 in the Abruzo region of Italy and after the War immigrated to America. He took jobs as a construction worker in Nassau County and married a woman named Rosie and had a son and a little daughter.

No one is sure of the circumstances of how Mr. Riccardi came to Hampton Bays, but around 1995, at the age of 58, Riccardi bought a vacant 2-acre flag lot off Wakeman Avenue in that town. In the middle of a woods in the center of the property, he built a two-story residence with his own hands. He lived there alone. And though over the years he met with neighbors from time to time, he said he liked his privacy and was in mourning for his daughter, who had died as a young woman.

Soon thereafter, diabetes caused him to go blind. Neighbors helped him string ropes around the inside of his house so he could get from the kitchen to the bedroom to the living room. There was even a rope from his front door to the mailbox at the end of the long driveway, so he could make his way out there to get the mail. Sometimes the Hampton Bays Senior Center van would come for him and he’d go to the Center and then be brought back later. He would walk the neighborhood, getting around with a cane, but sometimes people would see him veer out into the street and would help him back. He did befriend people, or to put it more accurately, people befriended him.

It seemed he was a man in need. At his house, people would come and bring him food and drinks and his mail. They’d read his letters to him, read him the newspapers and books. They would cook for him and attend to his affairs. He was separated from his wife by that time. In 2003, he learned that she had died of natural causes. He went into a deep depression and was, in 1995, briefly hospitalized at the Brunswick Psychiatric Hospital in Amityville.

One such person who helped him during this period was Adriana Molina, who lived nearby and who kept him company, kept a log of his bills, paid them with his checks and made meals for him. Another was Pam Giacoia, the director of the Southampton Town’s Senior Center, who went to his house several times and offered to bring him home-cooked meals, provide daily care, medication and transportation. He announced proudly he did not need any help. He cooked for himself he said. And so she left.

Ms. Molina said that in recent years, when she’d go to see him, after a while he would become irritable and would take a swat at her with his cane. “Always missed,” she said. She had him over to her house for Thanksgiving, when he played with her two young sons. He also talked about the old country, and about his wife, and his son who lives in Wantagh, from whom he had been estranged.

According to Ms. Molina, the last Thanksgiving she had with him was in 2005, which must have been three months before he died. A week after that, seeing that he was having more difficulty but was not accepting help, she called the police to tell them she was worried for him, but after the police visited him — he said he was just fine — Riccardi said he didn’t need her help anymore, that he was paying for nursing care. That was the last she saw of him.

When nobody was paying the bills or answering the mail, various services to the Riccardi house were turned off. The cable television was turned off. The mail stopped coming and was marked returned to sender with no forwarding address. But the electricity stayed on, because although the bills were no longer being paid, it is LIPA’s policy to give every customer every opportunity to pay the bills. And although they were unable to contact him, they still were in the process of giving him one last chance to catch up. Thus, when Riccardi was found, the heat and lights were still on, and because the well water pump was working, there was running water.

“This was a case,” a LIPA representative said, “where we did exactly what we were supposed to do. We don’t let people freeze.”

Riccardi’s TV was broadcasting a screen of snow when his body was found. That he was dead a year was determined, as we wrote last week, by the dates on the perishable packaged food and drink in the refrigerator.

He had refused all help. He had wanted to go alone. And he did. His body was turned over to his son in Wantagh for burial.