GREENFIELD — The man found dead in a retention pond along with his partially submerged truck earlier this week was identified as Johnnie Paul Street, 61, Greenfield.
Greenfield Police Department officers responded to the report of the truck in the retention pond near the 1500 block of Springhurst Boulevard Wednesday evening, June 30. Officers discovered Johnnie Street face down in the water and pulled him out before he was pronounced dead by Greenfield Fire Territory paramedics. No one else was located in the vehicle or in the water.
The Hancock County Coroner’s Office conducted an autopsy Thursday morning and is awaiting the results of a toxicology report, expected in three to four weeks, before determining a cause of death.
“We don’t want to speculate anything,” Nick Jaussaud, Hancock County chief deputy coroner, said on Friday. “There were some physical discoveries during the autopsy, but at this point we have to wait for toxicology prior to assigning cause of death.”
Street’s estranged wife, Julia Street, said they had been at the Hancock County Courthouse for a preliminary hearing regarding divorce proceedings shortly before his death.
“John had changed a lot over the years,” Julia Street said. “He came from a very difficult background, and he overcame a lot. He had accomplished a lot for a person who came from the background he did.”
He lost his father at age 7 and dropped out of high school at 16 to get a job and a car so he could help his mother, who had never owned a vehicle and didn’t know how to drive, Julia Street continued.
Johnnie Street earned his GED and joined Job Corps, which sent him to Clark College in Indianapolis after he tested impressively on an IQ exam.
“He was extraordinarily intelligent,” Julia Street said, adding she also attended the college and met him in a computer programming course. “I used to key in his programs for him because he never could type worth a darn, and I was a very good typist, and we got to be friends.”
Johnnie Street ended up not enjoying computer programming, and dropped out of the program. He later attended Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, where he earned a degree in engineering technology and worked as a civil engineer in the construction industry, from which he retired in 2006.
He was gentle and an animal lover, Julia Street also said. The couple never had children, but adopted four dogs over the years. Johnnie Street had also volunteered for Greenfield/Hancock County Animal Management.
“He loved my family like he’d been born into them,” she continued. “He and my mother had the same sense of humor, and they used to just devil each other to no end.”
He was close with her father too. She said he never got to know his own very well because he worked nights and died when his son was so young.
“John always said Dad was the only father he’d ever known,” she said.
