In Norwich, rare brain disorder claims pillar of community
Aug. 20—NORWICH — His friends say he was endlessly upbeat, a champion of the homeless, a private man who thrived in fraternal organizations, a mentor.
In the end, misfortune overtook him.
Leslie Brent King, 65, a retired Navy man who served on the Commission on the City Plan and the Board of Assessment Appeals and as vice president of the Norwich Property Owners' Association, died last month less than three weeks after being diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or CJD, a fatal brain disorder.
Chief among the disease's features is its rareness. Worldwide, one case occurs per 1 million people each year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In 2022, there were 538 cases in the United States.
People who get the disease usually die within a year of its onset. So, when might the clock have started ticking for King?
"Looking back on it, I think Les was showing the symptoms for a while," Richard Allen, one of King's close friends and fellow Masons, said last week of King's cognitive decline. "We attributed it to normal forgetfulness."
On June 6, Allen and John Paul Mereen, another King friend and fellow Mason, heard from a police officer patrolling downtown. King, who had locked himself out of his Boswell Avenue home, where he lived alone, had asked the officer to call them.
After they got him inside, Allen promised to take King to a doctor the next day.
In the emergency room at Backus Hospital, the decision was made to admit King. Weeks later, after transferring him to Hartford Hospital, which sent him back, doctors at Backus diagnosed King with CJD. He died July 22 in the Masonicare Health Center in Wallingford, on whose board he served.
If not for his friends, King might have died without his relations knowing.
"Once we got the diagnosis, our role turned into, 'We've got to find his family,'" said Christian Tynan, of New London, a third friend and fellow Mason. "We had to preserve his legacy in a way."
The friends located King's cellphone and, when he couldn't provide them with the password to unlock its contents, turned it over to his doctor and nurses. They learned the password and the names of two relatives, a nephew and a sister in Aurora, Colo., whom Allen was able to reach.
For the sister, Sherry Templeton, who took Allen's call on July 6, it was at once "the best phone call and the worst phone call I ever got," she said.
In that call, she learned the brother she hadn't seen in decades "wouldn't be making it." Two days after getting the call, she and two of her four children boarded a flight to Connecticut, where they would spend several days in Norwich, visiting King in the hospital.
"I'm extremely grateful that they got a hold of me," Templeton said of her brother's friends. "I feel so blessed and lucky to have spent a few days with Les."
Asked what had kept them apart so long, she said, "I never understood or knew why."
King's survivors also include an older brother, Larry King, another nephew, his stepfather, a stepbrother and two stepsisters. Templeton said she believes the story King told some of his Norwich friends about having a wife and a daughter who were killed many years ago in a car accident caused by a drunken driver.
"I'm satisfied it's true," Templeton said of the story.
She also corroborated King's friends' description of him as always cheerful, always smiling.
"I think he lived his life on the outside," she said. "He kept everything else inside, private, just hidden away, maybe even from himself. He was happy with his surroundings and with how much he was loved and respected."
She remembered that King sent "a beautiful centerpiece" home to their mother every Christmas.
A life of service
Allen and Tynan pieced together King's obituary, a task that involved documenting his Navy career, his volunteer service on numerous boards and commissions and his membership in the Masons and other fraternal organizations. King belonged to the Masons lodge in Preston and had become one of the Connecticut Masons' highest-ranking officers.
King left his native Colorado in 1977 to join the Navy's submarine service, and over the next 20 years his assignments included deployments on the USS Philadelphia (SSN 690) and the USS Dallas (SSN 700).
Tynan said King told him that while he was stationed on the Dallas, he was called upon to escort Tom Clancy, author of the best-selling submarine novel "The Hunt for Red October," during a Clancy visit to the Naval Submarine Base in Groton. Clancy referenced the Dallas in his book.
"We got to know each other over dinner," Tynan said of King. "I just picked his brain and learned about everything. He was a mentor. I can really credit him with how I view the world."
Upon retiring from the Navy, King started a real estate investment company in Norwich. As vice president of the Norwich Property Owners' Association, he helped shape laws impacting landlords and tenants throughout Connecticut.
"He was one of the good landlords," said Lee-Ann Gomes, the former Norwich human services director. "When I ran a homeless shelter, we devised a program that enabled the homeless to work. ... Les took a homeless guy into his building, made him the superintendent and kept him employed for years."
Gomes said King could be counted on to provide an affordable studio apartment for a tenant in need, and was instrumental in housing people who came to the area to work at the casinos in their early days.
Mark Kulos, a city landlord and school board member who knew King for 20 years or so, said he'd seen him infrequently in recent years. He remembered calling him "Gerald Ford" or occasionally "Mr. President," because Ford, the 38th president, was born with the same name, Leslie King, before taking his stepfather's name.
Though unable to discuss specifics of King's case, Dr. Mark Alberts, chief of neurology at Hartford Hospital and co-physician in chief of Hartford HealthCare's Ayer Neuroscience Institute, provided some perspective on Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
"We see a few cases a year in Connecticut," he said. "It's a very rare form of dementia, like Alzheimer's, that tends to strike older people. Unlike Alzheimer's, which comes on slowly over seven to 10 years, Creutzfeldt tends to come on more rapidly and progresses from diagnosis to death in 6 to 12 months."
Alberts said symptoms usually start with the disease's effect on thinking and memory and can eventually include twitching and loss of balance. Drugs used to treat Alzheimer's don't do much good, he said.
In the 1990s, a Creutzfeldt variant dubbed "mad cow disease" afflicted people in the United Kingdom who had consumed meat from diseased cattle.
The Most Worshipful Grand Lodge of Ancient Free and Accepted Masons of Connecticut will hold a gathering in honor of King at 2 p.m. Sept. 24 at the Holiday Inn, 10 Laura Blvd., Norwich, followed by a memorial service at 3 p.m.
