PLEASANT RIDGE PLANTATION – Investigators were trying to determine what caused the death of a Massachusetts man who was believed to have been living alone since midwinter in his car in a camping area in this Somerset County community.

John Connolly, 59, died Monday while en route to a Skowhegan hospital after a state trooper was called to the area by a passer-by who spotted him sprawled across the front seat of his 1990 Buick LeSabre, Maine State Police Lt. Dale Lancaster said Tuesday.

Connolly was alive but not responding well and his breathing was labored when Trooper Randall Keaten found him in the early afternoon, Lancaster said.

Connolly’s body was transported to the state medical examiner’s office for an autopsy, Lancaster said. He said there was no indication of foul play.

Keaten determined through a sister in New Hampshire that Connolly had lost his job in Massachusetts and had fallen on difficult times, according to Lancaster, who said a recent death in the family had made him despondent.

Stanley Giguere, the road commissioner in this community of roughly 100 people outside Bingham, said Connolly had been living in his car at the camping site for about two months, eating meals from a cooler he had placed in the back of the vehicle.

“I have been watching the guy,” Giguere said. “Every time I plowed the road, he’d move the car so I could plow. He was just living in his car.”

Giguere said he didn’t know of anyone who tried to talk to Connolly.