Leobardo Torres Sanchez was a fixture in Deep Ellum, selling cotton candy on the street. Many knew him as the "Cotton Candy Man."
"Everybody looked out for him," said Caterina Costante, co-owner of Bucky Moonshine's, where Torres Sanchez would park his car each weekend. He would tip the attendant a free caramel apple.
"Just a very gentle soul," Costante said.
Last month Torres Sanchez's daughter in Mexico got worried when she hadn't heard from him.
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"Out of nowhere, my heart felt that he wasn't going to be here," Miriam Torres Leon said via Zoom. "I always felt he was going to die alone because he didn't have anyone over there."
Torres Sanchez was found in his Old East Dallas rental unit under a pile of blankets with a heater that wasn't on because of a power outage. The cause of death has not been released.
"We just felt like, 'Gosh! We wish we would have known,'" Costante said. "We would have extended a room for him and we would have helped him, but it was just so sad to hear."
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In five days, a GoFundMe campaign has raised more than $9,000 to help get Torres Sanchez back to his family in Mexico.
"We are a very eclectic community," Costante said. "When you have a person who's there every weekend, who's now not, there's a missing piece to our puzzle."
