Man in wheelchair possibly beaten to death

A Navy veteran found mortally wounded outside a Houston boarding home in late March may have been beaten to death, witnesses and officials said.

It was nighttime on March 24 when a nurse at Grace Assisted & Independent Living at 4003 Wayne Street found 79-year-old Hubert Heatherly bleeding on the ground alongside his wheelchair.

He liked to sit outside the gated home at the corner of Crane Street and smoke, a resident at the Kashmere Gardens facility said on Thursday. He also liked to play with the neighborhood dogs, the resident said.

The nurse, Porcha Kato, and her husband thought Heatherly had fallen from his wheelchair and hurt himself, she said. He was only 4 feet from the front door where Kato said he had lived for nearly a decade since completing a prison sentence.

“After the fact, that’s when we found out that he was beaten,” Kato said.

First responders were called around 8:30 p.m. that night and Heatherly was taken to a hospital, where he died on March 27, according to police.

An autopsy revealed Heatherly had suffered “traumatic injuries to several parts of his body not consistent with a fall from a wheelchair.”

The Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences depicted the fatal injuries as “blunt force trauma to the head” in a phone call to the man’s estranged son, John Heatherly, who had assumed that his father had died years earlier in prison. It took about two weeks for the medical examiner’s office to track down a next of kin for the elder Heatherly.

Save for a single prison letter, Heatherly had not heard from his father in nearly three decades, he said Thursday.

“I didn’t even know he was still alive. I tried to find him a few years ago,” the son said, never knowing that he had been living in Houston.

The residents of the home care facility likely knew his father better than he did, he said. And what little he did know, was from his mother who died 20 years ago. He only recently found out his father served in the Navy for two years until 1959.

He plans to have his father cremated and interred at a veterans cemetery in Corpus Christi.

“I don’t even know if he had any friends,” Heatherly said. “It kind of sucks that foul play might have something to do with this.”

Police did not immediately say if a suspect had been identified. At the time of the 79-year-old’s death in March, investigators asked that anyone with information to call the HPD Homicide Division at 713-3083600 or Crime Stoppers at 713-222TIPS.