Who was Ricky Sarvis, and why did he live in a tent?
Ricky Sarvis sat in a chair holding his stomach at his job at Lyerly’s Cleaners in West Ashley on a Monday afternoon last month.
Sarvis, who rode his bike to work, didn’t feel well enough to pedal home, so his boss, Bob Lloyd, gave him a ride.
He called in sick Tuesday, and then no one heard from him Wednesday. When people from Lyerly’s called, he didn’t answer. Lloyd began to worry. He kept calling Sarvis and leaving messages.
Sarvis never called back.
By the time Lloyd tracked him down, Sarvis had been dead for three days in Charleston’s homeless encampment known as Tent City.
For many who knew him best, their sense of shock went beyond news of his death: No one at the cleaners or in Sarvis’ family even knew he had been living on a plot of state land beneath a freeway overpass. Only those living in nearby tents had a clue.
At a memorial service on Feb. 5 at McAlister-Smith Funeral Home on James Island, a few dozen people gathered to honor the life of James Richard Sarvis.
Mourners included his former sister-in-law and nephew, two remaining remnants of his fractured family that he kept in touch with; co-workers from his job at Lyerly’s; friends from Tent City; and advocates for the city’s homeless.
Sarvis, 59, a tall man with a warm smile, had a big heart, a quirky sense of humor, and he could fix anything with some duct tape, wire and few safety pins, they said.
His taste in clothing included such old and mismatched items that he was referred to as “wardrobe-challenged.”
Several speakers summed up his life by simply saying “Ricky was Ricky.”
Ricky Sarvis (left) with his mother Genette Taylor in 2011. | Photo courtesy of Post & Courier
The city of Charleston in the next several weeks will move out about 100 homeless residents who live in the encampment along Meeting Street near Interstate 26 and the Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge.
Many of the area’s homeless people for years have been living in small clusters of tents, tucked away where nobody sees them. But Tent City is in a location so visible it puts the area’s problem on public display, making it impossible to ignore.
People end up in Tent City for many different reasons, said Pastor Thomas Dixon, who officiated at Sarvis’ memorial service. Some are battling alcohol and drug problems, others have mental health issues, some struggle with personal demons, and others with the impact of injustice and other societal demons.
Many of them, like Sarvis, are difficult to understand. “Things can happen to anyone,” Dixon said.
Sherry Malson, Sarvis’ former sister-in-law, was in her home in Great Mills, Md., when she learned from a Facebook post that he had died in a tent days earlier.
He never told her he was homeless.
She soon embarked on a journey to Charleston to find out what happened to him.
Years earlier, she had been married to Sarvis’ brother Noah. She stayed in touch with Noah’s family, including Ricky, even after the couple divorced and Noah died.
Ricky was the older brother, but the boys were only about a year apart. Their mother, Genette Taylor, was very young, and by the time the boys were around 7 or 8 years old, she was divorced, broke and unable to care for them. So she sent them to the Falcon Children’s Home in North Carolina, where they spent most of the rest of their childhoods feeling alone and neglected, Malson said.
“It was sad,” she said. “They hated it there.”
Taylor remarried twice and had two more children, Malson said. But the boys never were invited home.
When they came of age, Noah joined the Navy, while Ricky drifted to New York City with no plan for his life.
Malson, who also was in the Navy, met Ricky for the first time in 1976, soon after she and Noah were married.
The couple had taken a trip from where they were stationed in Jacksonville, Fla., to visit her parents in Connecticut. At the time, Ricky was living in a bad neighborhood, eking out a living selling helium-filled balloons in Central Park.
Noah loved Ricky and wanted to help him, so they brought him back to Jacksonville.
“We housed, fed and clothed him,” she said. And Ricky did well for a while.
He got a job at a dry-cleaning plant, met a woman and got married. He developed a passion for boating, and he started spending his free time doing that with friends.
But the halcyon days didn’t last.
Ricky’s marriage fell apart, and he began bouncing from place to place and job to job.
The brothers had the same background, Malson said, but they were very different.
Noah had spent more than 20 years in the Navy as a master explosives technician. He was stationed at the former Navy base in North Charleston, and stayed in the area after he retired from military service.
“He was driven to be someone special,” Malson said.
Ricky eventually moved to the Charleston area to be near Noah. But Noah was killed in 2011 — hit by a drunk driver while riding his motorcycle, she said.
Ricky wasn’t an achiever, she said. “He just didn’t need what other people in America want. He could wear the same the T-shirt for five days.”
She and her son Christopher Maulden stayed in touch with Ricky after Noah died, and she sent him an occasional check.
Several years ago, she sent him a plane ticket so he could visit his mother, who was living in Florida. Sarvis had kept in touch with his mother even though he didn’t see her often.
Nobody at Lyerly’s, where Sarvis had worked for most of the past 10 years, knew he was staying in Tent City, said Lloyd, who runs seven stores in the area, including the one on Sam Rittenberg Boulevard where Sarvis worked.
Sarvis was one of three employees known as cleaners, who used chemicals to take the stains out of clothes.
Sarvis left the company a few times to pursue jobs in Florida, but after several months Lloyd would get a call from Sarvis asking if he could return. Lloyd said he always took him back.
Sarvis wasn’t just an employee, Lloyd said, he was a friend, and he was so much a part of the store that he had his mail delivered there.
He had been without a home several times over the past decade. A few years ago, Lloyd learned Sarvis was living in the store’s boiler room. After that, he was living in a shipping container on the company’s premises. Both times Lloyd told him that presented a liability for the business. He urged Sarvis to find a place of his own.
Lloyd also knew that Sarvis, from time to time, lived in a homeless shelter. And once he was asked to leave because he had been drinking. Sarvis didn’t use drugs, Lloyd said, and he wasn’t an alcoholic, but he had a taste for vodka.
“So I would constantly ask him, ‘Where are you living Rick?’ ” Lloyd said. And Sarvis told him he was sharing an apartment with a roommate.
“He didn’t have to live in Tent City,” Lloyd said. “None of my employees should be homeless.”
Lloyd recalls every detail of the afternoon of Jan. 4, when he gave Sarvis a ride home. He dropped off Sarvis on Upper Meeting Street, where Lloyd assumed Sarvis had an apartment. After turning around on a side street, Lloyd saw Sarvis walking along Meeting Street.
That was the last time he saw him alive.
Lloyd, a soft-spoken bespectacled man who relies heavily on his Christian faith, returned to Charleston that Friday after tending to another business he owns in Florida. He said he knew in his heart that he needed to find Sarvis and he believed God would give him clues on where to look if he just started at the last place he saw Sarvis.
So he drove to Upper Meeting, parked his car and started looking at the apartments near the place he dropped off Sarvis. He began peering at balconies and patios looking for signs. Perhaps he would see “a Rick bike,” something that looked like it was pulled from the trash but somehow made rideable. “I was walking around looking on people’s back porches for something that looks ‘Rickish,’ ” Lloyd said.
When he didn’t find any clues, he walked along Meeting Street in the direction he had last seen Sarvis walking. Just ahead stood Tent City, and something clicked. Lloyd remembered that just a few months back, a tent that Sarvis ordered had arrived at the cleaners.
Lloyd walked into the encampment, but everyone was either gone for the day or zipped into their tents.
“There wasn’t anyone anywhere,” he said, “so I started yelling, at the top of my lungs, ‘Rick! Rick Sarvis!’ ”
A woman emerged from her tent and told him that Rick lived there, but he couldn’t be around because his bike wasn’t there. After Lloyd explained to her that Sarvis had left the bike at the cleaners, she took Lloyd to Sarvis’ tent.
“We stood there together and opened it. We both yelled, ‘Rick, wake up!’ but he wasn’t going to wake up.”
Sarvis lay face-down on the far side of the tent behind a collection of plastic bottles that once held soap and dry cleaning solution. Lloyd later learned Sarvis used the liquid to start bonfires at the encampment.
That’s when Lloyd called the police.
He wonders now if he should have taken Sarvis to the hospital instead of driving him home that Monday. Sarvis’ co-workers have told him there’s no way he would have seen a doctor, “but I think I could have made him go,” Lloyd said.
Samson Pierce, a friend from the encampment, was there the day Sarvis’ body was found. He and Sarvis had lived near each other in different encampments for four or five years, and they had become close friends.
“We talked our problems out,” Pierce said. And at the end of those discussions, Sarvis “could always put a smile on your face.”
Maybe he should have checked on Sarvis when he didn’t see him around for a few days, Pierce said. But sometimes, when it got cold, Sarvis would get a hotel room. So Pierce didn’t worry. He assumed Sarvis wasn’t home. “His bike wasn’t there.”
After his friend’s body was found, Pierce hovered near Sarvis’ tent until the coroner arrived. “Then I got so emotional I had to leave,” Pierce said.
The Charleston County Coroner’s Office conducted an autopsy, but the results won’t be available for a few more weeks. Charleston police have said no foul play was involved.
When Malson got to Tent City, a few days later, she started rummaging through Sarvis’ things in the tent that was crowded with junk, moldy from the dampness and reeking from decaying food in a cooler.
“That wasn’t my Ricky. My Ricky wouldn’t live like this,” she said to herself.
She hopes his death encourages people in the Lowcountry to help residents of Tent City, particularly since some of them, like her late brother-in-law, either can’t or won’t seek help on their own.
Sarvis will be laid to rest in the Oak Park Cemetery in Wakulla County, Sopchoppy, Fla., with his mother, grandmother and grandfather, she said.
Malson said she would have helped him, even brought him back to her home in Maryland. “I can’t understand why he didn’t tell me,” she said.
Eventually she found Sarvis’ signature blue backpack. It was worn and tattered with a broken zipper, and held together with safety pins. Among the papers inside, she discovered a Christmas card she sent Sarvis four or five years ago.
“It took the breath out of my heart,” she said.
She broke down and cried.
While so many questions may never be answered as to why Sarvis choose to live in a tent, despite co-workers and family willing to lend him a hand, the discovery of the card showed that his decision wasn’t a rejection of those who cared most for him.
“That card was special,” Malson said. “It gave me some closure.”
Article written by Diane Knich for The Post & Courier | Published February 19, 2016