Corina Knoll (The New York Times) reports on the tragic death of David Breaux, son of a Jamaican mother and French Creole father from Louisiana. “After graduating from Stanford, David Breaux struggled to find his path — until he found his calling as ‘the Compassion Guy.’”
It felt as if he had always been there, a steady sight on a busy corner in a college town.
Hovering above 6 feet tall with hazel eyes and hair streaked with gray, David Breaux was a graduate of Stanford University and had been an aspiring screenwriter. But such details belonged to a past he rarely spoke of. He had reimagined his purpose, becoming a fixture at the intersection of Third and C Streets in Davis, Calif.
It was there that he held a notebook and offered passers-by a question: Would you care to share your definition of compassion? You, charmed by the interaction, most likely jotted something down. And then maybe you stuck around to talk a little more.
Over the years, Mr. Breaux made countless connections and grew a reputation as a communal therapist of sorts. Business owners revealed their anxieties. Students spoke of finals week. Unhappy mothers divulged marital problems.
“If you’ve ever been through a divorce, you feel like the rug has been pulled out from under you and that you might not make it. I sat down there with him, and he really saved me,” said Kristin Stansby, 54, a shift manager at a local CVS Pharmacy. “You just really felt you could pour your heart out to him.”
Elsewhere, Mr. Breaux might have been dismissed as an oddity. Unhoused and without a job, he sometimes slept outdoors.
But in a liberal town where idealism tended to flourish, he was embraced. Much of it had to do with his temperament. He had a genuine, soft way about him and a soothing voice.
He became so intrinsic to the city that he was widely known as “the Compassion Guy,” someone whose presence was both treasured and ordinary.
Until the cruelest of endings and a paradox.
At 50 years old, Mr. Breaux was found stabbed to death on a park bench in late April.
Mr. Breaux’s calling came after a breakup with a girlfriend left him dejected. Searching for inspiration, he discovered activists like Karen Armstrong, the British author and scholar on religion, who spoke about how compassion was inherent to peace.
He dived into the idea of selflessness, giving away his belongings in Oakland and eschewing movies, poker and video games. A friend in Davis, about 70 miles northeast, offered him a place to stay. He arrived in the spring of 2009.
Mr. Breaux’s post was on a main thoroughfare lined with restaurants, bars and shops in a town that swells to about 100,000 when University of California, Davis, students arrive each fall. It was near the campus and across the street from Central Park, home to the city’s beloved farmers’ market. [. . .]
Amid a hub of energy, he offered calm. Anyone who asked about his day got the same response: “Peaceful.” [. . .]
The tranquillity belied a chaotic past.
Mr. Breaux’s mother, an immigrant from Jamaica, had been diagnosed with schizophrenia before he was born. His father, a janitor at an industrial supermarket bakery, was often emotionally and physically abusive.
“We grew up in constant arguing. Pretty much every day there was yelling in our house or some kind of scuffle,” recalled Mr. Breaux’s sister, Maria, 54. “But David during this entire time was just super mellow. I have never seen him be mean at any point during my life.”
The siblings and their older brother were raised in Duarte, a small city in Los Angeles County at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains. Maria and David Breaux were especially close, able to joke about the awful events in their lives and finding solace in two aunts who saw their intellect and tried to smooth the way. But when she went off to Stanford, he was left to help care for their mother. He dipped into a depression in high school and, according to his sister, attempted to take his life twice.
[. . .] Mr. Breaux did not have an eye toward upward mobility. He spent summers working as a counselor at a camp for families of Stanford alumni. Excited by creative expression, he wrote a script shortly after graduating. He also worked as a substitute teacher in Southern California.
When he began his unconventional path in Davis, many of his classmates did not know what to make of it. [. . .]
For full article, see https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/05/us/david-breaux-stabbing-compassion-california.html
[Photos of Mr. Breaux left at the bench he frequented in Davis, Calif. Credit…Jim Wilson/The New York Times.]
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