How we survived: The death of Howard McKinney (Pt. 2)

Memories of another disaster

(Editor’s note: As the 10-year anniversary of Z-Day approaches, this series looks back on the events and little-told stories of 2010. This is part 2 of 5 in the story of Howard McKinney. Read Part 1 here.)

By Juliette Mendelssohn

Howard McKinney, who spent three years in jail after being wrongfully convicted of murder, was working at Chicago Heights Retirement Home during the 2010 outbreak. In the aftermath of the outbreak, McKinney took it upon himself to care for the home’s eight elderly residents.

“When the food and drugs was runnin’ low,” said Robert Cornwell, 2010 resident, during a 2011 interview, “he decided he’d go out and find everything for us. We told him not to bother, to save himself, but the boy wouldn’t think twice. Said he’d never live with himself if he left us to die. Poetic, that.”

McKinney used a window that exited to an abandoned alley, according to then-resident Bonnie Nowak. There was a dumpster below the window that he could jump to, and its height prevented the unable-to-climb zombies from gaining access of their own.

“As I understand it, each of the residents said their goodbyes before he left,” said Jeanine Hobart, 2010 Chicago Heights director. “As they explained to me, they told him not to return and, though he insisted, none of them thought he would once he got outside. They all thought that was the end, that they’d starve to death or die from lack of medication soon enough.”

McKinney, though, refused to abandon his charges, though he’d been working at Chicago Heights for less than a month at the time. He was gone for about eight hours, Nowak said, and came back with “a feast.”

“We couldn’t have imagined more food, not in that atmosphere,” she said. “When he came back in, he had bread, peanut butter, jelly, deli meat, bottled water. He must’ve found a drug store, too, or else he made it around to the main pharmacy of Heights, because he had every drug every one of us needed, and enough to last us for a long time. The young man was wonderfully impressive.”

According to Cornwell, McKinney refused to tell the residents what had happened during his mission outside.

“He wouldn’t say word one ‘bout what happened out there,” Cornwell told the Chicago Tribune. “Honestly, it reminded me of some of the vets after ‘Nam. Shit happened, and you didn’t talk about it any more’n you had to.”

All the residents knew, Nowak said, was that McKinney came back with a limp and a long cut along his left arm, and was much “shakier” than he had been before his departure.

“Whatever happened out there, it wasn’t easy for him,” she said. “You could tell in his eyes that he has seen some stuff out there. You could tell he had had to do more than he ever had before.

“The boy was a saint,” she added, “so I never would have believed he could have killed anyone like the others said he must have, but if I had had any doubt left, they would have been gone when he got back with our supplies. He was traumatized — whether it was by what he saw or what he did, I don’t know, but his eyes stayed wide after that first trip outside. I was worried about him — worries that, I guess, came to fruition in the long run.”

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The cut along McKinney’s arm — which, Nowak said, he had attempted to care for using “what must have been an entire box of Band-Aids” slapped up and down the gash — was apparently not caused by any interaction with zombies, as McKinney did not turn upon his return. Cornwell, in his 2011 interview, said that he worried about an infection.

“(McKinney) hadn’t took near enough care of it,” Cornwell, an ex-Army medic, said. “The boy was good for day-to-day care, baths and medicine and the like, but he just didn’t know how to handle serious injuries like he had.”

Cornwell said he tried to use the supplies on hand to care for McKinney’s injury, and they bandaged it as best they could, but he and the other residents agreed that McKinney needed better care than they could offer.

“We told him again, was time to go,” Cornwell said. “No point in stayin’ to care for a group of old people who didn’t have thirty more years between ‘em. He just refused.”

Their attention turned away from McKinney’s arm when another resident had an emergency, Nowak said.

“One of the ladies — Anna, if I recall, though who knows for sure anymore — started to panic,” she said. “Howard stopped worrying about his arm altogether and went to help her.”

The woman’s name was Anna Zabuzhko, according to records provided by Hobart. She had moved to the United States after the Chernobyl disaster of 1986, and, Hobart said, suffered from significant Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder as a result of her experiences in Ukraine.

She had come to Chicago Heights in 1998,” Hobart said. “It was far earlier than her physical health required. But she had become increasingly unable to separate the real world from her experiences in 1986. Any little thing — an alarm clock, a surprise door slam — was liable to set her off.

“Frankly,” Hobart added, “it’s something of a miracle she didn’t melt down, if you’ll forgive the phrase, as soon as the events started.”

It was McKinney’s return, Nowak said, coupled with an emergency siren some number of blocks away, that set Zabuzhko off. She had a panic attack, including a frantic attempt to run, despite the fact that she hadn’t been able to walk in nearly a decade.

“She fell,” Nowak said, “and flat refused to let anyone help. ‘No,’ she hollered, and she still had a thick accent, ‘No, you will force me to return! I will die!’ Every time one of us tried to help her up; it was a total non-starter.”

Nowak said Zabuzhko remained on the ground, desperate to escape, for more than an hour.

(The story of Howard McKinney will be continued in a later edition.)