By Kathryn Skelton,Staff Writer

LEWISTON – The people who hang out at the soup kitchen beside Kennedy Park have a new mantra: “You never know.”

As in, you never know when your number’s up.

Five regulars have died in the last seven months, part of a group of 50 or so who frequent the Trinity Jubilee Center for meals, clothes and camaraderie.

Jack died in November. Evelyn and Walter in February. Richard and Vincent in May.

The oldest was 53, youngest 42. In life, illness and alcohol abuse were common themes. But even for this group often living on the edge, their deaths were surprising.

“What’s going on – all these people are going so quickly,” said Marie Knapp, who lives on nearby College Street. “I think it’s really a curse going on, I really do.”

Autopsy reports on two men are pending from the Maine Medical Examiner’s Office, but police on both sides of the river – one death was in Auburn, four in Lewiston – aren’t investigating any of the deaths as suspicious.

Walter had been sick the longest, a year, and was featured in the Sun Journal in January as someone who had battled chronic homelessness.

“He was getting very thin. We all just thought it was alcoholism,” said Jean Austin, the center’s executive director.

He had brain tumors removed over the winter. Walter and his younger brother, Vincent, had ties to Trinity Church going back to childhood. Friends said Vincent took Walter’s death hard.

Vincent died suddenly in May, just three months after his brother.

“I used to live with Vinny. I had no place to go. Vinny put me up,” said Amanda Libby, 20. “After he found out about his brother, he just kept drinking more and more and more.”

Jubilee Center program coordinator Calvin Dube described the younger man as the sort to give his food stamps to a mother when she didn’t have enough to feed her family: “He ate here and at Hope Haven instead of having the luxury of buying what he really wanted.”

There are stories like that for each person lost.

Evelyn doted on her children. She and her partner had been homeless off and on, living in a car at one time.

Richard, normally reserved, enjoyed putting on costumes when the occasion called. He talked a lot about his military career.

“People called him The Colonel,'” Austin said. She didn’t recognize his obituary when it appeared in the newspaper, with a photo of a striking young man in Army dress.

When Jack felt good he volunteered in the kitchen. He had chronic heart problems and struggled to stick to a smart diet.

“He still loved coming over and having chocolate cake and donuts,” Dube said.

Jack’s funeral in the Salvation Army’s chapel was standing room only, so full there were chairs in the hall.

“He was always here – in the park or here,” said Jack Walsh Jr., his son, sitting on a bench recently in the center’s courtyard. “Everybody loved my dad around here. Everybody called my dad Uncle Jack.'”

Of the spate of deaths, he said: “It’s crazy. I don’t know, it’s crazy.”

Libby, who called Jack “the best,” buys into the curse theory.

“My son’s going to be 3 next month. It really scares me, not knowing. You could walk down the street, anything could happen,” she said.

Austin has been executive director at the center for two years. Jack’s death was the first she had experienced there. In the past, even one a year had been rare, said Dube, who’s been at the center nine years.

“This has really drained people, I think,” he said. “It’s hard for some of them to even discuss it. They don’t want to be approached.”

The Jubilee Center serves lunch four days a week and a less organized breakfast of coffee and pastries several mornings. Between 65 and 125 people show up at each meal.

There are no restrictions on sobriety; everyone is welcome.

“We feed them and accept them the way they are here. They don’t get that, not all the time,” Austin said.

Several people have asked Austin and Dube to put a memorial to the dead on the wall. A rough plan is in the works, perhaps with laminated obituaries and candid pictures.

“It does kind of put your mortality right up there,” Austin added.

Misti Cates Omil of Auburn said she planned to buy two 40-ounce bottles of beer and dump them in the park to remember the brothers, Vincent and Walter.

“They weren’t just friends, they were family,” she said.