Homeless man died. Neighbours came to the rescue of his cats

FOR maybe a decade, Antonio Garcia lived in an alley in a gentrified Chicago neighbourhood.

He made a shelter from wood scraps and mattresses, and he had as his companions dozens of feral cats, which he considered family.

He befriended a few people in the upscale community, Fulton River District, some of whom took to stopping by with food for him and the cats.

Nearby restaurant owners liked that Garcia kept away any riffraff, and they liked that the cats scared off rats.

Garcia, 65, died of hypothermia inJanuaryafteraparticularlycold spell. A few of his neighbourhood friends tearfully cleaned up his alley, but there was the problem of the cats - dozens of them, hungry and skittish now that their protector was gone.

And that is how four women ended up caring for a colony of about 30 alley cats. The women stop by twice a day to feed and check on them. One made “cat condos” constructed in part from old yoga mats.

“These cats were his family, they were all he had. He was a very devoted cat owner,” said Cynthia Doepke, 28, who was a friend of Garcia’s and helps take care of the cats.

“They meant the world to him. The thought of being separated from them brought him to tears.”

Leona Sepulveda Less, 40, a friend of Garcia’s who lives in the neighbourhood, made the “cat condos” - small insulated structures - for the felines after Garcia died.

Sepulveda Less, a former contestant on “The Bachelor”, befriended Garcia a year and a half ago. She was strolling with her daughter and saw some cats peer at her from an alley. Sepulveda Less, a stay-at-home mum who had worked in animal rescue for years, followed the cats and encountered Garcia.

He had an outdoor living room set up in the alley with a couch and chairs.

“He put out his hand and said, ‘Hi, I’m Antonio,’” Sepulveda Less recalled. “I shook his hand. That began our friendship.”

She asked him whether all those cats were his, and he said yes and promptly introduced her. “This is Lorena, this is Chicharito, Alfredo, and so on,” she said.

She sensed that he loved the cats. But he was homeless, and she was worried about whether the cats were being fed enough, so she returned another time. And then again and again.

Their friendship blossomed. They didn’t talk about much other than cats, but that was enough.

She would ask him if she could bring him a tent or sleeping bag, and he would always decline, saying please just feed the cats.

“If my cats have food, my heart is full,” she remembers him saying. He once gave her a stuffed animal, a lemur, for her daughter.

Through the animal rescue and pet community in her neighbourhood, Sepulveda Less learned that Garcia had other friends who helped with the cats.

After a time, some of them pooled their resources and got the cats spayed and neutered.

Stray cats are a problem in Chicago, with hundreds of thousands of them roaming the streets, she said.

Once the cats were sterilised, the friends were able to have them designated a “colony,” which protects them from being caught by the city and potentially euthanised.

Doepke, who has worked in the pet and rescue community for years, spearheaded the effort to get the cats spayed and neutered.

She said she was “speechless” when she learned that there were at least 30 cats in the alley.

“A cat colony normally is not more than eight,” she said. “Thirty cats is way off the charts.”

In January, the women noticed that the alley was becoming more unkempt, and soon they learned that Garcia had died. Even though the temperatures were below freezing, he did not ask for or accept help. — WP-Bloomberg