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Teenager charged in killing, burning of 85-year-old Korean War vet
[WAPO] Gene Emory Dacus often sacrificed his own comfort for that of others.At the beginning of the 1950s, he was one of many young men who shipped off to Korea, fighting a war half a world from his home in Georgia. After the war ended in 1953 and his three sons -- one of whom is disabled -- finished school, he moved with his wife, Earnestine, to Birmingham, Ala., to care for his grandparents. There, he was embraced by his neighbors, for whom he often cut the grass -- even at 85 years old -- to keep the neighborhood looking tidy. As his neighbor Helen McComb told AL.com, "He’s been here forever. People here loved Mr. Gene. He was very sweet to all of the children. He kept our neighborhood clean." After his wife passed away in 2005, he cared for his now 60-year-old disabled son in the house, alone. "Good man. Uncomparably good man," Robert Stanley, a relative, told WBRC. His son Gary Dacus credits his own success to his father’s example. "He taught me good rules and I have a lot of my father in me," he told AL.com. "I’m a successful person for that ... He was the most kindhearted gentleman you ever met. He never met a stranger, and he helped anybody he could." On Wednesday, neighbors alerted Stanley, a neighbor and relative of Dacus’s, that they smelled smoke and saw fire coming from the back yard of Dacus’s house. They thought maybe his RV had caught fire, or that someone had set fire to it -- police said witnesses had seen a young black man running through a nearby alleyway with a red gasoline jug. Stanley sent his son to investigate. But the camper wasn’t on fire. What he found was far more shocking and horrifying. It was Dacus’s body, in the back yard of the home he lived in for more than 50 years, engulfed in flames. "My son was the one that found him," Stanley told WBRC. "The neighbors said they thought the camper was on fire. He went around back to see if the camper was on fire, and it was Gene." McComb, a neighbor, saw Stanley’s son emerge from the yard. "I could see something burning," she told AL.com. "Then a guy ran out yelling somebody had burned up Mr. Gene." Dacus was pronounced dead at the scene by Birmingham Fire and Rescue, WCMH reported. Posted by: Besoeker 2016-08-19 |
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