Another homeless person found dead along Hawthorne Avenue corridor

Bell’s supermarket on Hawthorne Avenue

By Joe Johnson

For the second time in a month a homeless person has been found dead outside of a business along Hawthorn Avenue.

The body of 58-year old-old Kenyatta Saki Booze was found dead the morning of June 7th behind Bell’s supermarket at 995 Hawthorne Avenue.

A month earlier, on May21st, a 55-year-old man’s body was discovered in an SUV in the parking lot of a chiropractor’s office at 700 Hawthorne Avenue.

Authorities say that foul play is not suspected in either man’s death, and they are awaiting the results of autopsies that were conducted at the state medical examiner’s office.

The police department was notified about Booze by a Bell’s assistant manager who’d been alerted by an unidentified man to a lifeless body in a rocking chair behind the supermarket.

Another employee told of seeing Booze in the chair on the afternoon of June 6th, when he and the homeless man had a conversation.

Police said they reviewed security footage that shows Booze in the rocking chair at 4:43 p.m. on the 6th, when he is seen raising a hand, dropping it minutes later and then slumping over into the position in which police would later find him.

They identified him from the wallet that he’d wedged into the rocking chair.

Retired county coroner Sonny Wilson said during his 16 years in office, from 2009 to 2014, nine homeless people died along the Hawthorne Avenue corridor.

Two of the deaths occurred inside vehicles, six were in camps located in the woods, and one person died at the Salvation Army shelter.