A week ago -- amid unrelenting triple-digit temperatures -- Donald Ahrens, 72, seemed to have a premonition. That morning, as he had each day for the last five years, the Bakersfield resident took a newspaper to his neighbor, Shirley Mackey. She knew him as a man of few words, but on that day he made a request.
"He just said, 'I passed out. I wanna know if you'll keep your eye out for me. And if you don't see me, will you call my kids?' " Mackey recalled.
When two days went by with no morning paper from her friend, Mackey, who is 75 and in ill health herself, telephoned Ahrens' son. That afternoon, Ahrens was found face down in the kitchen of his sweltering home -- with heat listed by the Kern County coroner as a contributing factor in his death from cardiovascular disease.
Like many who have died, Ahrens was older, in poor health, living alone, on a fixed income and reluctant to use cooling devices even as temperatures soared past 110 degrees.
"He had a swamp cooler, but he wouldn't use it," Mackey said, referring to a machine that cools air through evaporation of water and costs less to run than an air conditioner. His "kids told me he wouldn't spend the money," she said.
"People on these fixed incomes -- "it's hard to pay these bills. You can't do it," she said.
Ahrens is one of more than 140 people whose deaths are believed tied to California's deadliest heat wave in generations. Some left behind grieving loved ones. Others lived largely solitary existences, a factor that officials said probably put them at greater risk in the heat.
Sarafin Mendez, 70, may have been dead for some time before his body was discovered more than a week ago in a trailer he had parked for some years in a Fresno family's backyard. When he moved onto the property, according to the homeowner, Mendez said he was retiring after long working in the fields.
"He asked if we had a little room for him, because he was all alone," said Rosa Bermudes, who let him stay for a monthly fee.
On the evening of July 22, Bermudes' daughter-in-law noticed a "bad odor" coming from the trailer, said Jeff Cardinale, a spokesman for the Fresno Police Department. She and her husband climbed into the trailer to find Mendez dead on his bed.
The outside temperature topped 100 degrees that Saturday, and the trailer did not appear to be equipped with air conditioning or any other cooling system.
The family did not know Mendez's medical history, Cardinale said.
