Skeletal remains were discovered in a shed near the state prison in late April. Just a day later, another man’s long-deceased body was found near the highway bridge beside the Friendly Kitchen. In early May, a 25-year-old living in an RV parked at the former Steeplegate Mall died in a fire. A local adult softball team, on a muggy June evening, found the body of a man in his campsite in the city-owned woods near Memorial Field.
This December, on the cold granite outside the State House, their names will be read aloud and their lives marked with a candle at the annual vigil for people who died experiencing homelessness in New Hampshire. The vigil is held on the longest night of the year, and in some cases, it’s the only public recognition of these lives lost. Last year, 54 names were read aloud, a dozen of them Concord residents.
Those honored at the vigil often led troubled, complicated lives, including run-ins with police and criminal convictions. But their loss, like any other person, is felt immensely by those who knew and loved them. To friends, family and neighbors in Concord, these individuals were mentors, artists, protectors and companions. Below are memories, as told by people over lunch at the Friendly Kitchen and at the Concord Coalition to End Homelessness’s Resource Center.
“He is not here in flesh,” Alexander Pierre said of a friend he lost last year. “But in spirit, he’s been here and he will be here. Just like any other human, homeless or not.”
Alongside grief and remembrance, the reality of living outside was unmistakable.
Jason Gross said it was “normal” for him to hear his friend, Eric Lassonde, had died. Not because he had been battling cancer, but because he was homeless.
“I hear that all the time,” Gross said. “We lose a lot of people out here on the streets.”
Jessica White Booth had known David Browall since he was a kid — he dated her daughter, Shyanne, in middle school and was close friends with her son, Logan.
“He was like a son to me,” she said. “Always has been. Always will be.”
When he walked into the Dunkin Donuts where she was working five years ago, though, she hadn’t seen him in some time.
Both Browall and White Booth, at the time, were living out of their cars. They came to rely on each other.
“If I had parked anywhere in Concord for the night, he’d make sure that he was right there next to me, to make sure that I had no problems with anybody,” she said. “He’d see if I need anything, help me fix my vehicle.”
When White Booth later found housing, she’d bring him a blanket, a hot meal or propane refill when he needed it, or let him take a hot shower at her place.
When she heard that his trailer, parked outside the Steeplegate Mall, had caught fire, killing him, she “lost it.” She visited its scorched remnants, where a blue SUV attached the trailer sat on risers, to see if anything could be saved for his family.
“I still have a hard time with it,” she said.
A lengthy obituary describes Browall as a tinkerer, someone who’d hide little welded sculptures in his mother’s house and picked up the family knack for car repairs. It said he was “the very personification of summer.”
When Browall was identified as the victim of the fire, online posts and comments excoriated him for his past actions — he went to prison in 2018 for posting explicit images of ex-girlfriends on the internet.
Seeing those comments both broke White Booth’s heart and stoked her anger. To many of them, she fired back.
“He made some wrong choices, and he was in the process of trying to get his life back on track,” she said. That meant trying to find odd-jobs to put together enough to repair his car, so he could get to and from regular work. It meant trying to stay sober.
“I was homeless for five years, and he was a huge help to me when I needed it,” she said. “Without the support, it’s hard to change your life.”
Lisa’s caring demeanor was her signature, so much so that she was known to many as “Momma” or “Auntie,” according to memories shared at the vigil last year.
She was the kind of person who’d help anyone with anything without judgment. She’d share food or clothing with anyone who needed it.
Shaine Halfpenny knew her as someone who regularly came to his side when he had a seizure. She was so calming and attentive, he assumed she had a medical background.
She showered this love most of all on her family, according to an obituary. She liked to be outside at the beach, fishing or camping with her daughter.
Cheney, who was 59, died in hospice care surrounded by her family after suffering a stroke in her encampment.
Halfpenny hadn’t heard.
“She was friends with everyone,” he said. “She was a good person. She was a good person to me.”
Tim Hoyt used to be a mall Santa.
Sebastian Rainie heard him tell the story time and time again, recounting kids who would sit on his lap each December and rattle off their holiday wishes.
He remembered the girl who wanted a dozen toys but he knew her parents didn’t have a dollar to spare. He later learned someone sponsored her gifts that year, buying everything on her wishlist.
To Hoyt, that showed the good in the world, said Rainie.
“He was outside for so long, he was a rugged man,” said Rainie. “But if you knew that side of Tim… he was really a softy.”
Rainie met Hoyt, 68, living outside in Concord. Hoyt’s mobility was declining, and he used a walker.
Together they’d “shoot the shit” and smoke cigarettes. As his friends’ health got worse, Rainie helped make him a list: Go to city welfare, ask for a hotel voucher, get a phone and learn to navigate Medicaid.
Hoyt was hit by a car on Fisherville Road before he could complete the punch list. Just before 6 a.m. on a morning at the end of February 2024, he was struck and killed on a walk to Dunkin’ Donuts.
“He loved me,” said Rainie. “We got along famously.”
When Anthony Shinholster wanted his mom to know that he was OK, he’d put Randall Jacques on the phone.
“I wouldn’t call my mom around most people,” Shinholster said. From back in Philadelphia, he knew she worried about how he was doing and who he was spending time with. Jacques, he told her, was solid. By the end of those calls, Shinholster would be prying the phone back.
Jacques would welcome him into his van to watch a new movie that had just come out. He helped show him places where they could get a meal.
“He was a hype man,” Shinholster said.
He was also a talented painter, which he put to use making his apartment — which he’d gotten through the coalition a few years before he died—his own, painting on his walls, his shower, even his light bulbs.
This streak of mischievousness earned him the nickname SAM — secret agent man.
Jacques was close with his own family—two grown sons and an ex-wife, who remained a close friend.
Eric Lassonde liked boxing and music. Friends would connect their phones to his speaker and he’d blast everything from AC/DC to Dr. Dre.
Alexander Pierre knew that Lassonde wanted to find housing.
“He wanted peace. To be able to go to work, come back and everything’s fine. To not have to carry two, three duffel bags with him,” Pierre said.
To 24-year-old Pierre, Lassonde was more than just someone he’d shoot hoops with. He was the one who took Pierre under his wing. On walks along a city trail or going for a drive with the music turned up loud, he’d be quick to set Pierre’s perspective straight.
“Try to be grateful and be appreciative. Try not to be a scumbag,” Pierre remembered Lassonde telling him. “Because we’re all in the same community, going up against the same things.”
This guidance, he said, “had a huge impact on me personally,” Pierre said. “It kept me on a certain path, a certain level of, ‘hey, the city don’t got us. But we got us.’”
Nate Doyle knew Lassonde before either of them experienced homelessness in Concord. The two were couch surfing in their twenties and hit it off.
“We were like two peas in a pea pod back in the day,” he said.
Lassonde, who was born in Concord, died of cancer in October. He was 32 years old.
Doyle saw his friend a few days before he died. He didn’t know he was sick, he said.
“He kept it hidden,” Doyle said. “It was kind of rough.”
Lassonde loved to entertain and smile. “He’d just be him,” said Doyle. He also remembers his friend as someone who didn’t judge others at their worst and would lend an ear when needed.
“He was one of the best people to be around,” said Doyle. “He was always there for me.”
Patrick Hoyt helped Chey Lorde move at a moment’s notice. A twelve-hour day transpired and he never asked for anything in return, she said.
“He was just being a good person and doing that for us,” she said in an interview after his death last year.
It was so kind that Lorde hoped Walsh would set up camp next to their site. She normally stuck to herself, leading a more solitary life while she was unhoused with her husband, but that moment with Walsh showed he was someone they could trust.
He returned to his own camp, though. Months later he died by suicide at the site, near the Merrimack River.
Known to friends as “Mountain Man,” Walsh was 64 years old and experienced homelessness for two decades.
