| February 14, 2003
Note: This story was reported and written
in one day.
Love endures: Elderly
man's slaying dashes dreams
By REBECCA COOK
Associated Press Writer
CENTRALIA, Wash. (AP) _ This is not a happy love story. It begins with
an old man begging on the street, and ends with his life seeping away on
a lonely country road.
Still, it is a love story. Between the hardship of his life and the
brutality of his last moments, the old man also knew sweetness, hope,
and a love that lives on, even after death.
Until his beaten body was discovered on a roadside the day after
Christmas, most people in this small town knew 90-year-old Nick Alvarado
simply as a beggar who constantly pestered them for money.
But 83-year-old Minnie Fenn knew him as her sweetheart, a tender and
thoughtful man who promised to take care of her forever.
What almost no one knew is that for years Nick Alvarado saved the
crumpled bills and spare change he panhandled, paying bit by bit for a
set of gold wedding rings for himself and his Minnie.
He carried those rings the day he died _ but now they're gone. Police
say finding the rings might be the key to solving the mystery of who
killed Minnie Fenn's love.
___
Minnie can't always remember details. Her soft voice shaking, she says
she might be 103 years old, or 203.
But
she does remember one thing, always. "I loved him very much," she said
this week, huddled under a blanket in an easy chair next to Nick's
picture. "I miss him so bad."
Nick and Minnie met eight years ago at their nursing home. He came by
her room and they started talking, and she told him he could stay for a
while. He did, and they soon moved together into their own
265-square-foot apartment with cracked linoleum floors in Centralia, a
small town south of Olympia.
Nick did special things for her, Minnie said. He talked to her, brought
her glasses of milk and read her passages from his dog-eared Gideons
Bible. His favorite was John 3:16: "For God so loved the world, that he
gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not
perish, but have everlasting life."
At
night, they would fall asleep holding hands.
They never married, because it would have reduced their government
assistance checks. But they seemed like husband and wife to neighbor
Cathy Johnson.
"He
did everything for her, and I mean everything," Johnson said. Nick was
spry, while Minnie is frail and uses a walker. He got her out of bed in
the mornings, cooked for her and helped her dress.
Johnson heard them talking sometimes _ both were hard of hearing so
their conversations could get loud. But she never heard them fight.
"It
was a relationship you don't see very much of any more," Johnson said.
"He waited on her hand and foot."
They quarreled sometimes, though. Nick liked to walk around town for
hours, and Minnie hated to be alone. On Christmas night, she cried and
begged him not to leave when he decided to walk a few blocks and get
coffee.
___
Not
everyone in Centralia thought Nick was a sweet old man. He was the
resident panhandler in this town of 15,000, and he rarely took no for an
answer.
"He'd been thrown out of a lot of places," said Centralia Detective Jim
Barrett, who's investigating Nick's death.
Pastor Bill Pinneo of the Praise and Worship Center, where Nick's
funeral was held, said he first met Nick when the old man pounded on his
back door late one night and asked for money.
"He wouldn't take food. He just wanted money," Pinneo recalled. "He
didn't have no friends except for Minnie."
During the day Nick would stake out the bank parking lot or the grocery
store, begging money to buy coffee. He would even knock on car windows.
He was a regular at The Hub Tavern, where he would drink coffee, gamble
on pull-tabs, bum cigarettes and sit for hours.
"I
felt sorry for him," said owner Jim Francis. "People were sometimes not
kind to him."
But
coffee wasn't the only thing Nick bought. In the summer of 1999 he
picked out a set of rings from Harry Ritchie's Jewelers in the Lewis
County Mall, and started paying for them on layaway.
"He
would literally bring in a bag of money, a brown paper bag," Barrett
said. He paid small, odd amounts, $5 or $7 at a time, then would go
panhandle in the mall.
Eventually, he paid off the rings, which totalled about $1,000: a
14-carat gold man's wedding ring with three small diamonds, and a
woman's two-part engagement and wedding ring, with one primary diamond
and several smaller ones.
But
he didn't give them to Minnie, not yet.
"He
said he had something for me, but he didn't tell me what it was," Minnie
said. Nick carried the rings with him when he went out for coffee on
Christmas night.
His body was found early on the morning of Dec. 26, battered, bleeding
and suffering from exposure, beside a road about a mile from town. He
died later that day at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. His rings
and wallet were missing.
Police said this week that finding the rings is their best shot at
finding whoever left Nick there to die. Barrett said several promising
leads surfaced after an article in The Chronicle of Centralia last week
mentioned the rings.
Minnie would like to see those rings one day. No matter what happens,
she believes she will see Nick again.
"I
pray that he's OK," she said, "and that I'll see him one of these times,
when my time comes." |
