He had lost contact with the cops he had worked with, most recently in the Northeast District.
He was so alone that he worried nobody would find his body after he died - maybe they wouldn't care enough to even look.
It was Jan. 29, a Thursday, at 9:09 in the morning, the day his surgery was scheduled, that he called 911 and told an operator, "Ma'am, I'm planning to shoot myself."
His voice was as steady and cavalier as someone ordering a pizza. He was polite, not a trace of urgency or hesitation. "I don't want the body to stink up the neighbor's house," he said into the phone.
The operator asked whether he had any weapons, and he said he had two. She asked where he was, and he told her he was in his upstairs back bedroom, and that he had left the front door unlocked so officers could get inside.
He had a .40-caliber Glock and a .38 Smith & Wesson revolver.
Eldridge chose the Glock - the kind of gun carried by city police - to end his life. The operator was still on the line when he pulled the trigger.
It's hard to imagine being so alone, and the extent and reason for whatever emotions caused him to take his life may never be fully known or understood. For Detective Wynn, who gets paid to immerse himself in this city's overabundance of death and despair, this case is a stark reminder that people need to help each other and ask for help for themselves.
Wynn could have shoved this file aside, written a perfunctory report and moved on. But he is driven to get others to care about a man who should not have been allowed to die as he lived - without family, without friends, without someone knowing even a little about him.
For the detective, who has spent 40 years on the city force, it's a lesson to get friends outside the job. "When you're in uniform, everybody knows who you are," he said. "Then all of a sudden you retire, and nobody knows who you are. After being in his house and reading his stuff for 12 hours, I realized he didn't have a friend in the world."
Eldridge was born June 27, 1946, at Union Memorial Hospital and grew up on Daywalt Avenue. His parents were both from Philadelphia; his father worked as a clerk at Sparrows Point. He graduated from Polytechnic Institute in 1964 and headed off to the University of Maryland.
