Texas veteran joined his sister in NH, hoping to find housing. He died while homeless less than a year later

Deborah Eckland could tell the coroner had never said the words out loud before.

“Animals ate his face.”

She fell to her knees, off the small bench in her living room and wailed.

As the words sunk in, she knew her brother didn’t deserve to die that way. She was struck by how inhumane someone’s life – a veteran’s life – could be in their final moments: Alone, frozen in the snow, ravaged by animals.

“It doesn’t get any more tragic than that for a homeless person,” she said. “It’s just not acceptable. It’s not for any human being. It’s just not.”

Glenn Chrzan’s body was found among sticks and scattered trash in a patch of dirt near an off-ramp of Interstate 293 in mid-March.

His sister had spent the last 47 days looking for him before police officers knocked on her front door and delivered the news no one wanted to hear.

Eckland traversed Manchester, where she’d take the first bus out of Concord and typically the last ride back, to search. She walked and hollered his name with her southern drawl through downtown in the alleys off of Elm Street, along the banks of the Merrimack River, over the bridge where cars would whiz by and across to the west side of the city where he was last seen. As she tried to retrace her brother’s final steps, the cold winter wind would rattle her backpack.

Police reports provide a simple account of Chrzan’s last few days. He left Catholic Medical Center on January 28 just before 8:30 a.m., wearing a black puffy jacket and pants and headed towards the houses behind the hospital with slippers on his feet.

Eckland pieced together a much more detailed account.

He must have gotten startled, she thinks, after doctors told him he had congestive heart failure and lung disease. He headed for the dumpsters outside the hospital before security shooed him off. From there, he started walking through an unfamiliar city with no phone or sense of direction.

She pleaded with police to do more to locate her brother. 

“It was all his pattern, everything,” said Eckland. “If they were to listen to me that first day, they would have found him.”

A silver alert wasn’t issued until Valentine’s Day, 17 days after Chrzan left the hospital. His body was found just over a month after that.

While New Hampshire State police is responsible for issuing a silver alert, local police led the investigation following his disappearance. Manchester police said they have no comment “on the investigation or the timeline leading up to the silver alert.” Catholic Medical Center officials offered condolences to Chrzan’s family and friends, but said they could provide no further information due to patient privacy laws. State police could not provide an interview before the Monitor’s deadline. 

Eckland’s tears about the loss of “Brother Glenn,” can quickly turn to anger. She wants to hear from the police department why they didn’t share her sense of urgency. She wants to know how he just walked out of the hospital into the cold. And in one of the richest countries in the world, she wants acknowledgment that her brother’s life mattered. 

“Someone didn’t take time to care about another human. And dammit, that’s their job,” she said. “It’s not vindictive. It’s not against anybody. It’s justice for him for the way he died.”

‘Homeless in America’

Eckland hadn’t seen her brother in a decade.

She’d left Texas for New England years ago, gotten married, had a kid, later divorced and watched her upscale house and corporate job crumble.

For nearly two years, she lived in alleys in Manchester and eventually off the train tracks in Concord.

“I used to say that when I was homeless, ‘I can’t believe I’m homeless in America.’ I went from a $600,000 house to homelessness, in the snap of fingers, like a tornado,” she said. “I watched it all liquidate in front of me.”

Little did she know, her brother was experiencing the same fate 2,000 miles away.

Chrzan served in the U.S. Navy and later moved back to Texas with their mother. After she died, he was evicted from her house. For a decade, he slept on the streets.

A housing voucher brought Eckland into a one-bedroom apartment near downtown Concord. She’s been housed for seven years and still knows all the food pantries and laundromats within biking distance.

Chrzan never got that chance.

Last year, Eckland got a call that her brother had been hit by a car but was alive in a Houston hospital. A nonprofit organization was looking to reunite people experiencing homelessness with willing family members. They could send Chrzan to New Hampshire to be with his sister. He arrived in June. 

Since Eckland found housing, she’s been quick to open the door to many who seek solace from a night outside – a shower, a meal, Bible study group. The rules are simple, no drugs and no long-term stays. It’s the least she can do for the people she “left behind.”

These folks have become her adopted family. She’s watched “her girls” she met on the street find housing and start families. Their kids are now her “grandbabies,” calling her Mama Texas and squealing as she folds them into her arms for a big hug.

With Chrzan, she was ready to help her real family. But his luck finding housing in the Granite State never materialized.

“He just wanted me and that’s why he came here and that’s so heartbreaking,” she said. “He wanted to be with me and the system let us down.”

Eckland was due for an annual inspection for her housing voucher, a luxury she couldn’t afford to lose. Any long-term guests in her one-bedroom apartment would violate her lease. With an eviction, they’d be back out on the street together.

Chrzan couldn’t live with his sister, so he stuck to what he knew.

‘His biggest advocate’

Nicole Petrin, a social worker with Concord Police, noticed Chrzan’s name among the call logs last summer. He was new to the area and often lost – “benign things,” she said – but had enough interaction with local police to pique her interest.

On a Friday afternoon in the summer, Petrin met him behind the Market Basket on Storrs Street. He had a flattened cardboard box, a sleeping bag and not much else. He politely refused her offers to help and kept to himself.

“From day one, he’s just the kindest, kindest man,” said Petrin. “He was just always under the mindset, ‘somebody else needs it. I’m sure somebody else needs your time more than me.’ Just so selfless.”

Eckland would check in on her brother, circling by his usual spot on her bike. When she couldn’t, Petrin would. The two often traded notes as to where Chrzan was and what he needed. 

With his sister, Chrzan worked through mounds of paperwork – acquiring a birth certificate, ID and Social Security card. Eckland hoped a housing voucher would come next.

Petrin came back regularly, with outreach teams and social workers from Veterans Affairs, Riverbend and the Concord Coalition to End Homelessness, offering shelter options, routine medical checks, mobile food pantries and new clothes.

It wasn’t until November, as sleet and rain came down and Chrzan sloshed around in his rubber Crocs that he finally surrendered to an offer – he’d take a bed for the winter at Helping Hands, a shelter in Manchester that offered 90-day stays.

Larry Nice, the executive director of Helping Hands, said Chrzan was engaged at the shelter. He worked with case managers there to look for a permanent place. With his veteran status, he would have been near the top of the list for assistance.

Eckland was skeptical, though. At Helping Hands, he was separated from her and Petrin, two of the people he learned to trust. But she knew he needed to do to get off the street, because she’d been there herself.

To Petrin, that’s what made the relationship between the siblings so unique.

“She was his biggest advocate,” said Petrin. “No matter what decisions he made, she was going to fight for him. No matter how long he was missing, she was going to continue to access transportation and resources to go find him and go look for him.”

‘Every day’

For almost two months straight, Eckland would rise before the sun and walk a mile to Concord’s bus terminal. At least the doors were unlocked, and it had an available bathroom.

The red Manchester Transit Authority bus would pull up at 7 a.m., though she learned not to count on an exact time. A day pass cost $5.

By 7:30 a.m., she’d get off in downtown Manchester, across from the park she used to sleep in, where the city would turn on the sprinkler system in the middle of the night, scattering the people sleeping there.

On Elm Street, Eckland walked by the stoop next to Ben and Jerry’s where she’d sit to regroup. She remembers the shop owner as one of the nicer ones. The same corner store where she’d wander into years ago still sold packs of 24/7 Red 100 cigarettes – a habit she hopes to someday kick.

From there, she’d cross over the Merrimack River on Bridge Street, which was covered with icy banks that concealed the sidewalks, towards the hospital. 

On the last day of January, a few inches of snow had fallen and temperatures plummeted well below zero with the wind chill. She knew how unforgiving the wind could be as it whipped through soggy layers of clothing. She’d called local and state police, jails, the morgue and other hospitals to no avail.

By the third day of looking, her gut told her that Chrzan was dead. But she didn’t stop searching. 

Large cardboard signs fastened with a duct tape strap shared the message beyond earshot of her yells. On one, she carefully traced black uppercase letters “MISSING” with two photos of Chrzan. The other, she wrote with red marker, asking people to call 911.

If people didn’t already recognize Eckland by the signature cowboy hat she’d wear, the poster boards strapped across her back became a familiar sight.

“It didn’t matter rain, snow, that one storm we had, that was all of it. It started out with wind, then there’s nice little mist, foggy stuff and then there’s rain and sleet,” she said. “I’d hold the sign up to block the wind.”

Each day was marked by a mission – a mantra she’d repeat to herself as she walked for six miles or more across the Queen City. One day, she knocked on the doors of the homes near the hospital in hopes that footage from a Ring doorbell camera or security system caught a glimpse of her brother. The first house on the block had footage, and she narrowed her search further to a mile radius.

Another day’s focus was all the retail stores in the area. She hoped a cashier or more security footage would have seen a short, grizzly guy who had likely come inside to seek solace from the cold.

One night she made snow angels on the sidewalks as she waited for the bus. Every so often, she’d turn up the music on her cellphone speaker and dance out in the street while documenting her search through short videos she posted on Facebook.

Petrin feared the worst as she talked to Eckland.

“We all worried this was going to be the outcome, knowing how cold it was the month of February, knowing how vulnerable Glenn was,” she said, choking up. “He didn’t have anything out there with him. He didn’t know the area.”

On February 14 state police issued a silver alert. That day was different and she danced through the aisles of Market Basket celebrating that someone finally listened.

As cars passed her on the street, drivers called out that they were searching for her brother, too. Police knew her name and her story, reassuring her they were also on the lookout.

“I just kept my mouth shut and kept hoping,” she said. 

It took another month before his body was found.

A few times Eckland came close to the on-ramp to 293 South where his body was frozen under the snow. Just a few yards away was a Mobil gas station where a friend had parked after one drive. She had stopped into the Dunkin’ for a hot coffee during her searches, right across the street from the grassy area where the curb dipped down.

“Every day I had a new plan, where I would go and what I would search. And every time I got close to this side, where he was, and I was standing on that corner and looking down that street, so many hours,” she said. “I think about why didn’t I just walk straight? Why didn’t I just go that way? But I never did.”

The final spot

Eckland has taken the bus a few times since his death. The first was to pick up his ashes. She put the black box from the morgue into a backpack and walked him around Manchester for the afternoon, pointing out the magnolia tree that would bloom where she’d sleep sometimes and once more by the shelter, as friends waved from the windows.

On a small table in her living room, the box sits among the signs from her search. A wooden cross and a fluorescent pink “love” sign also decorate the table.

In a few months, she’ll bury him at the Veterans Cemetery in Boscawen. Afterwards, she wants to have a barbecue – grilling hot dogs and hamburgers like they used to do as kids in Texas near the lake with neighbors.

In the cemetery, a granite tombstone will honor his name among other veterans in the state. Chrzan is one of a handful of veterans experiencing homelessness that the city of Concord hoped to house. The state has a similar mission, with a goal from the Department of Military Affairs and Veterans Services to end veteran homelessness by 2026.

Eckland also wanted to mark his final spot in Manchester.

Once more she traversed across the river, over the bridge and towards the highway. She pulled a black wired cart with three grocery bags, stuffed with two blueberry bushes and a handful of gardening tools.

As she walked, she thought about her final moments with her brother. 

He came to Concord for Christmas after they’d missed his birthday. She set up the futon in her living room for him and made him pose for photos with her.

Eckland woke up to find half a ham on the kitchen counter. She’d spent the previous day cooking, but in the middle of the night, Chrzan scarfed it down. She was annoyed, but chuckled. 

She wanted to have him over for her birthday next: Together they’d go shoot pool and eat cake.

It was the last conversation she had with her brother. She wept as she thought about it.

Stepping over fallen branches through dead leaves to the area where her brother died, Eckland found a small opening, just big enough where he probably laid down.

She took to the dirt, hacking away with a small shovel and ripping roots with her bare hands.

The blueberry bushes would give new life to a place where his was lost.

“Here you go, brother Glenn.”