RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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Joseph W. Huff was just getting settled into his retirement years when he died inside his Oak Lawn home earlier this month.
His first pension check arrived the same week Oak Lawn police officers found him dead while conducting a wellness check, according to his son and local police. An autopsy determined Huff, 65, died from heat stress and cardiovascular disease. He’s the eighth person in Cook County to die from heat-related causes so far this month, according to the Cook County medical examiner’s office.
“I just feel like it was too soon, he had just turned 65,” said his son, Joseph Huff. “In my eyes, he had a good amount of life left in him.”
He last spoke to the elder Huff on Father’s Day in mid-June, which they now believe could have been just days before he died.
The elder Huff was found inside his Oak Lawn home on July 14, the day temperatures reached 96 degrees at nearby Midway International Airport, according to the National Weather Service and the Cook County medical examiner’s office.
His death occurred as the Chicago area was experiencing a heat wave with the maximum temperature at O’Hare International Airport falling just a few degrees shy of the record 100 degrees , set in 1998. The area also experienced an air quality alert that week.
The extreme heat in July has been tied to the highest number of deaths in a single year in more than a decade, according to a WBEZ and Sun-Times analysis of data from the Cook County medical examiner’s office. In 2019 and again in 2022, six people died from heat-related causes .
The others whose deaths in July have been attributed to the heat are: Stephanie Rodriguez, 45; David Gonzalez, 44; Barbara Whigham, 71; Mike Rodriguez, 57; Daniel Machnikowski, 69; Victor Ferguson, 48; and David P. Sopys, 46.
The younger Huff said his family isn’t sure when exactly his father died, though they believe he could have been dead for as long as weeks before police officers found him. His father didn’t have any pre-existing health conditions they knew of and wasn’t taking medications.
His dad spent years working in factories where employees learn to work in heated conditions — so if anyone knew how to prepare for the heat, it would have been his dad, the younger Huff said. “The way it happened, how quick it happened … it’s still really shocking.”
The elder Huff lived inside a trailer that did have air conditioning, but the younger Huff didn’t know if his father’s unit worked well enough to cool the home or if it had stopped working. The trailer was damaged this summer during one of the storms, he said.
The younger Huff said his father kept to himself but would go out of his way to help someone else.
“He just had a big heart,” he said.
While he’s still trying to make sense of his father’s death, the younger Huff said he hopes it spurs people to check on their neighbors, especially the elderly.
“We need to come together as a society and try to make things better on our own,” he said.
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