Greg Devoy Loved Boats and The Water

    In the late afternoon of February 8th, 2010, a homeless man named Greg Devoy began walking up Stearns Wharf and collapsed before getting as far as  the Harbor Restaurant. When paramedics arrived, they pronounced him dead. Later, the coroner’s department said he’d had a heart attack.
     Devoy, who was 53, told a reporter last fall that he’d been in Santa Barbara four years, homeless the entire time, but wouldn’t explain how his life had devolved to such a degree.  He was sitting, at the time, on the bench he seemed to favor, at the foot of the wharf, being peppered with questions about being homeless in Santa Barbara. After ten minutes he said he’d had enough.  “Just say these people are great,” he said. But he went on to add an oblique reference to a divorce, a house, and a lawyer.
     His street buddies said he was a really good guy despite a persistent, pernicious alcohol habit, and that he avoided sharing any details of his past.     “As far as I’m concerned, he was running from something,” said Thomas Michael, 62. “And he doesn’t have to run anymore.” 
    Sergeant Greg Whitesman of the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s coroner’s division said Devoy had had severe hypertension but declined to take medication for it: When doctors from the organization Doctors Without Walls-Santa Barbara Street Medicine approached him on their regular Wednesday evening rounds to the homeless, Devoy demurred offers of help. Strangely, a man named Joey was with him in the minutes before his collapse, and said there were no outward signs of physical distress. 
     Back in Rhode Island, Devoy’s ex-wife Linda said neither she nor their son had had any contact with him in 8 years. But she said that since she began working in the mental health field, she has developed a theory that her former husband was struggling with a mental illness. “The more I learn, the more I believe he was bi-polar,” she said. “He refused to get treatment. We went to counseling, I wanted him to take medication but he was totally against it.”  Ultimately, she filed for divorce. 
    “I don’t how the hell he ended up in Santa Barbara. I knew he went to Florida for a while. He always loved boats and the water,” she said. 
      Linda Devoy said her former husband had been a welder for many years, and worked on submarines, and was also an avid fisherman. 
     “He was a wonderful man. Very smart. Very kind,” she said. “He was the love of my life.” 
    The couple’s child, Greg, is now 23. 

Devoy is on the left in photo above. 
Photo by Paul Wellman