In rescue of man, 84, one mailman delivers
Published: August 9, 2006
When US letter carrier Karl J. Schmuch saw the pile of uncollected mail at the elderly man’s home, he suspected something was wrong.
“He usually picks up his mail,” Schmuch said in a telephone interview yesterday. “That immediately got my mind to question whether everything was OK.”
It wasn’t.
Prompted by an anxious relative and Schmuch, police later entered the Park Street home of Harold Libby and found the elderly man lying in a second floor bedroom where he had fallen some 83 hours earlier.
“It must have been 100 degrees in there,” Hamilton Police Chief Walter D. Cullen said yesterday, detailing the Monday rescue. “With the heat and everything else, it could have been a bad situation. That was a good call by the mailman.”
Cullen said that the house did not have any screens and that storm windows were closed .
Cullen said the 84-year-old Libby was severely dehydrated and complaining of pain in his side when they found him. He was taken to Beverly Hospital, where he was listed in good condition yesterday, a hospital representative said.
Libby, through a hospital spokesman, declined to be interviewed yesterday. “He said, `I don’t want to be a celebrity,’ ” said the spokesman, Shawn Middleton.
According to Schmuch and police, Schmuch first noticed the stacked-up mail around 11 a.m. Monday and, because he does not carry a cellphone with him, asked a neighbor to call police. Instead, the neighbor contacted Libby’s daughter-in-law, Susan, who lives in neighboring Beverly.
After talking to the neighbor, Schmuch went back to delivering mail, but returned to Park Street 30 minutes later. He found Susan Libby trying to get her father-in-law’s attention. He urged her to call police, which she did.
“We are unable to get into the house,” Susan Libby told the police dispatcher, according to a 911 tape released by police. “Something has happened to Harold Libby. . . . I can’t get hold of my husband right now. And the mailman has suggested I do this next. Three days of mail. Three days of mail.”
In a telephone interview, Libby’s son, Stephen Libby, said he wanted to publicly thank Schmuch and a neighbor for alerting authorities about his father’s plight.
“We have good neighbors,” Stephen Libby said. “I’m glad they discovered it when they did.”
Stephen Libby said that when he was trimming the grass over the weekend, he somehow cut the telephone line to his father’s house. In response, he and his wife gave Harold Libby a cellphone so they could stay in contact with him. Libby said he thought a repair crew had fixed the problem over the weekend.
Stephen Libby said it was not clear to the family how his father ended up lying helplessly on the bedroom floor for so long.
“We are still trying to figure out why he couldn’t get to the phone,” Stephen Libby said, adding that his father is undergoing a battery of tests at the hospital in hope of finding the answer.
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