His last meal was a package of raw hotdogs and a 12-pack of Milwaukee's Best beer. He ate--probably alone--in an old tobacco barn that hugs the edge of Disposal Plant Road just a couple hundred yards away off West Seventh Street.
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He decided to end his life here. It was late last year, possibly around Thanksgiving, and he prepared for his death by writing a goodbye note to strangers. He scrawled his brief message with a pencil on a pair of 3 inch square, yellow PostIt notes. On one note he wrote, “Thanks sheffirs, friends, because your help me when I needed something. I hope the Lord give you a happy life....I'm Louis Blanco." On the other one, which is barely legible, he offered to donate his liver to anyone who needed it. Then he stuffed the notes into his denim pants pocket and started to climb. From a wooden pallet leaning against the inside wall, he reached the first of seven horizontal beams. Beam by beam, he ascended to the top, carrying with him an inch thick white nylon rope. That's where city police found him on Jan.27, 2002, hanging from the top of an empty tobacco barn.
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The barn is about half a mile from the Greyhound Bus Station, so he could have arrived on a bus, walked to one of the convenience stores on Seventh Street to get the hotdogs and beer, then headed for the barn to eat and drink. He might have slept there a few days.
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His body was found Jan.27. Although police speculate he killed himself around Thanksgiving after eating a last meal of raw hot dogs and beer.
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Louis Blanco was Hispanic and may have been around 50 years old. He was 5 foot 6, weighed about 160 pounds and had black and gray shoulder length hair. At the time of his death, he had a small duffel bag with very little in it and less than a dollar in change to his name, according to police.
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One of the last people Louis Blanco thought about before he climbed to the highest tier of a tobacco barn and hanged himself was Crofton Police Cheif Chuck Gresham.
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When Gresham learned earlier this week that Hopkinsville Police had found remnants of Blanco's last meal... in particular, the wrapping from a package of hot dogs..in the barn on Disposal Plant Road, he realized that he was the police officer mentioned in the suicide note. Until then Gresham had all but forgotten about the Hispanic man he found walking alone one night on U.S.41 in Crofton. He had not made the connection between the suicide victim and the man he encountered about three months ago. "I can't pinpoint the day, but it was sometime in early November," Gresham said. "The wind was blowing real, real hard. It was cold."
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Gresham said the night he met Blanco, the man had no money. He told Gresham he had walked and hitch-hiked from Indiana, where he did seaonal farm work. He was from Mexico. Blanco said he had been in Crofton two years earlier. He was looking for a tobacco farmer who had given him work in the past. Gresham believed Blanco, although he suspected he was in the country illegally. Gresham's experience with U.S. immigration officials has been that they won't send an agent for one illegal alien. Rather than arrest him, Gresham decided to help Blanco. "You could tell he was a man down on his luck," Gresham said. Blanco did not ask for anything but Gresham knew he needed a meal and a place to sleep.I said, "do you have somewhere to go? It's cold. he said no." Gresham took Blanco to Crofton City Hall. When they got there, Kay Durham, a Crofton city councilwoman, went next door to the fire hall and took two packages of hot dogs from the freezer. Durham heated one package in the microwave oven, and Blanco quickly devoured the hot dogs.Blanco put the other package in his duffle bag along with several cans of soda, some bottled water and a blanket that Durham gave him. Gresham also gave Blanco $2 and Durham gave him $4 or $5. Durham's blanket was found in the barn where Blanco died. Police also found several beer cans left over from a 12-pack of Milwaukee's Best beer that he apparently had with the second package of hot dogs. When Gresham last saw Blanco, he was leaving city hall to spend the night in a mobile home up the street. Two Mexican farm workers shared the mobile home and one of them had agreed to let Blanco stay there until he found work. The mobile home burned several weeks ago. Gresham hasn't been able to find the two men who lived there to ask them about Blanco. Gresham found a piece of paper in his office this week with "Louis Blanco" written on it. He remembers that he had asked Blanco to write his name because he was having trouble understanding him. "His English was very broken," he said.Police don't know when Blanco left Crofton. He could have walked the 10 miles to Hopkinsville on U.S.41. The barn where Blanco died is less than a mile from Gresham's house.
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City police could never positively identify him, althogh they believe his name was Louis Blanco. The name is all they had. It seemed like something he wanted people to remember. Someone did. Last summer, a few weeks after Blanco was buried in the pauper's section of Riverside Cemetery, a North Christian County woman collected donations for a headstone for his grave. When she took the money---$170 to the old Hopkinsville Monument office next to the cemetery on North Main Street and asked what she could buy. She told office manager Greg Ramey that she didn't want to give her name. Her name didn't matter, she said. She was just an angel of mercy, she said. The woman didn't have enough money to buy a headstone. Ramey agreed to makeup the difference but said he needed a name to fill out a contract for his records. "We had to put a name on the contract, so she came up with Ann Rose." "That was her idea," he said. Ramey didn't know the woman and had never seen her before. But like him, she had read about Blanco in the Kentucky New Era and was apparently moved by the suicide note. "I just felt so sorry for the guy." Ramey said.When he designed the headstone, Ramey decided that it had to include Blanco's final message exactly as he wrote it, including the misspelled reference to a sheriff. Ramey said it just didn't feel right to change even a misspelled word. "I thought, no, he wrote this and I'm going to do it just like he wrote it," he said.