Mountain City resident Gordon Dye and other neighbors are joining forces and trying to maintain the property where Michael Dowd lived until his death several weeks ago. (Photo by Jen Biundo)

by JEN BIUNDO

Michael Dowd lived alone, and at some point – two, four, perhaps even six weeks ago – he died alone.

Residents of the small, close-knit community of Mountain City are coming to terms with the news that their reclusive neighbor passed away weeks before anyone realized he was gone, leaving behind a deteriorating house stacked with years worth of newspapers and hundreds of empty Blue Bell Ice Cream cartons.

Though they know there’s little they could have done to help Dowd, 56, neighbors on Maple Drive say they’re struggling with their own feelings of guilt.

“I feel horrible,” said his next door neighbor Gordon Dye, who called the Hays County Sheriff’s Office after realizing he hadn’t seen Dowd in several weeks. “I feel like I should have been more pushy as a neighbor.”

Mountain City is a small incorporated subdivision off FM 2270, just north of Hays High School, full of pleasant upscale homes on oversized, shady lots. With a population of 680, the community phone book consists of a few printed pages stapled together under a construction paper cover, and frequent community gatherings help residents maintain neighborly ties.

Despite nearly two decades of proximity, neighbors say that Dowd actively kept to himself, rarely leaving the house or having visitors.

Maple Drive resident John Hall said he’s had perhaps two very brief conversations with Dowd – “Hi, how are you” – in the 17 years that they lived across the street from each other.

Hall said he’d come to accept and not be bothered by the unkempt property, and believed it would have been disrespectful to ignore his neighbor’s desire for privacy.

“John Donne said we’re all part of the great continent of mankind and the death of any one of us diminishes us all,” Hall said. “We’re all part of a neighborhood and it makes me feel very sad that the man passed away and no one had missed him for a while, but on the other side of the coin, he was a very private person who really put a high premium on his privacy. You have to respect that. I guess he lived and passed away in the fashion that best suited him.”

Since about 1993, Dowd lived in the home on Maple Drive with his elderly mother Helena Dowd, whom neighbors said was retired from the U.S. military. Dye said the mother was friendly, and urged her son to wave at the neighbors and maintain the yard.

Helena Dowd’s health failed in recent years, and about three years ago she passed away, leaving her son alone in the house. The condition of the property worsened at that point, neighbors say, and Dowd hadn’t taken any steps to maintain the yard since last fall.

On June 19, Dye said it dawned on him that he hadn’t seen any activity at Dowd’s house in at least two weeks, and he began to worry.

Before making the call to the Hays County Sheriff’s Office, Dye followed the welfare check protocol he knew from his own job as a patrol supervisor with the Travis County Sheriff’s Office. He spoke with other neighbors to see if they’d seen Dowd in the past few days. He peered into the mailbox and saw several weeks worth of mail, including two separate utility bills, stacked inside. At that point, he knew it didn’t look good.

Pending an autopsy, Hays County officials are unable to give a cause or time of death, but say they believe Dowd passed away anywhere from two to six weeks prior to being found.

According to Hays County property records, the home was listed as belonging to a family trust overseen by Dowd’s brother, William Dowd.

Reached by phone at his home in Illinois, William Dowd said that though his brother was reclusive and had issues with hoarding, “There was no indication he had any mental health issues at all.”

“He was just a private person,” Dowd said. “He was very intelligent, he did very well in school, he enjoyed reading.”

Michael Dowd studied at Purdue University and received a degree in engineering from Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, his brother said, but never worked in the field.

William Dowd said he had been in contact with his brother, and was planning to come to Texas to take care of the estate. They haven’t yet decided what they’ll do with the property, he said.

Meanwhile, a group of neighbors are coming together to try and maintain the badly deteriorating property. They’re worried the home may have fallen so far into disrepair that it will have to be razed, but they’re taking steps to tame the jungle that has grown in the sprawling front and back yards.

“Everyone has indicated some interest in pitching in,” Dye said. “It’s brought the neighbors together.”

He pointed to a path cleared through the high weeds.

“I’ve done this here just to make a walkway,” Dye said. “This is about four hours worth of work.”

The soothing sound of running water fills the backyard, but it’s not a fountain. Near the rubble-laden slab of what once may have been a garden shed, under a tangle of weeds and vines, a broken white PVC pipe is gushing water at the rate of a kitchen faucet on full blast.

Dye said he tried to shut off the water main but was unable to budge it, and has called the Mountain City water supply. Nearby, Dye is worried that another pool of standing water might indicate a broken septic system.

Some counties have created multi-disciplinary task forces to help hoarders, said Jenna Baddeley, a Ph.D. candidate in clinical psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, because the conditions of their homes can often lead to public health risks such as rodent infestation, structural safety concerns and fire hazards. Some homes become so full that firefighters and emergency workers can’t make it inside to perform life-saving tasks.

The exact nature and causes of hoarding are still being debated, though many psychologists believe hoarding is related to obsessive-compulsive disorder. Hoarding, Baddeley said, is essentially characterized by the inability to discard possessions and differentiate between things that have value and things that are worthless. Many hoarders have strong emotional connections to the objects, making it difficult to throw them out.

Hoarders tend to be socially isolated, and often struggle with depression. In a negative cycle, they may be deeply embarrassed by the state of their home, and don’t seek needed maintenance on the house because they don’t want anyone to see the state in which they live.

“The fact that he wasn’t tending to his property is pretty common,” Baddeley said. “The disorder is so impairing that it’s hard to get daily tasks of living done.”

Though they have difficulty understanding why their neighbor lived and died alone, Maple Drive residents say Dowd’s death has made them take a moment to appreciate their own families and loved ones.

“I think it makes us all stop and think about our relationships with each other,” Hall said.

Dye agreed.

“I count my blessings,” Dye said of his wife and two sons. “I’m very lucky to have all that. There’s a lot of things we take for granted.”