BLOOMINGTON

Louie Verriotto didn’t have a home, but he spent his money helping other homeless people more down and out than he was.

Verriotto chose to live among the homeless. Tuesday afternoon, after meeting with a woman who sought his help, the 69-year-old man fell to the ground at Bloomington’s Seminary Park and died. A heart attack is suspected.

“I can be callous and hard at times, but this man penetrated my heart,” said Pastor Tom Tackett, founder and director at Martinsville’s Manna Mission, a shelter for the homeless where Verriotto has been staying the past few weeks.

“When you look at the stereotype of a homeless man, he broke the mold. I have never met a man with a more sincere interest in helping people. He had a heart for the hurting.”

Emergency workers at the scene found a wire transfer receipt in Verriotto’s pants’ pocket indicating that shortly before he died, he sent money to someone at the Martinsville mission. Tackett said that while sorting through the man’s personal effects, he found a pile of such receipts.

Verriotto was regularly sending cash to struggling people in Indiana, Florida and other locations. “They were all to individuals, and the amounts ranged from $50 to $150,” Tackett said.

Verriotto told Tackett he had been living in Florida for years before coming to Indiana. He was in Bloomington for a while, then last month started walking north on Ind. 37 and landed at Martinsville’s downtown shelter.

He told Tackett he had been a teacher and coach in New York, but felt called to travel and minister to the homeless.

“Most of the people I meet are in it all for themselves,” Verriotto said in a July 22 story in Martinsville’s Reporter-Times newspaper. “They hold up signs or sell drugs. But I say, ‘I’m in the same position you’re in.’ I try to make them understand that you’ve got to care for people.”

Tackett called Verriotto an angel who appeared one day, then was gone. But he leaves a legacy beyond the newly painted facade at Manna Mission. He was almost finished repainting the building.

His message: Use what you have to help others.

Tackett said Verriotto had been attending a Methodist church in Martinsville, where parishioners who cared about the new man in town would press cash into his hand to help him out.

“He told me that people at the church had handed over $300 to him, and that he asked them, ‘What am I supposed to do with this money?’ and they told him, ‘Whatever. We just want to help you.’ So he let it flow through his hands and into the hands of the people who need it the most.”

On Sunday, Verriotto was among 60 people who came to worship at the Manna Mission service. “I can pretty much estimate what the offering is going to be, and it was way more than I expected,” Tackett said. There was $47 in small bills and change. And folded neatly together, another $300.

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