Posted on 03/29/2012 4:43:13 PM PDT by Thunderballer
Raeford, N.C. — As they buried a Hoke County couple killed in their front yard last weekend, family members said Thursday that they are still struggling to make sense of the tragedy.
Tommy Charles Brown Sr., 35, and his fiancée, Thalia Rebbecca Mook, 35, were gunned down outside their home on Philippi Church Road in the Rockfish community on Saturday evening, authorities said.
John Oliver Hill Jr., 48, who lives across the street, has been charged with two counts of first-degree murder in their deaths and is being held without bond in the Hoke County jail.
Hoke County Sheriff Hubert Peterkin said Brown asked Hill not to shoot guns in the neighborhood because children were outside playing. Hill then crossed the street with a rifle and shot Brown in the back, the sheriff said.
"When we heard the gunshots, we looked out the window. I saw my dad lying on the floor and my mom running out," 10-year-old Tommy Brown Jr. said.
Peterkin said Mook was shot when she ran outside to help her fiancé.
Antonio Tillman, 14, was inside the home with Tommy Jr. and two other children at the time. He said he told the others to get in a back bedroom while he headed outside.
"I did what I could because that's their only son, and I didn't want anything to happen to him," Antonio said.
After Hill left, he went out to grab a phone from Mook and called 911.
"It's hard to get it off my mind. I sleep, and I dream about it," he said, noting that Mook was like a second mother to him.
Family and friends said Tommy Brown Sr. and Mook made a welcoming home, and neighborhood children always dropped by, especially to play basketball.
(Excerpt) Read more at wral.com ...
Very wrong and they did everything to reach out to the guy too. They had the shooter over for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner
Schizophrenics should NEVER have guns.
If the races had been otherwise, a lot of people including me would be finding significance in that. Sometimes it’s not a matter of race at all - just bad or crazy people doing bad or crazy things. And sometimes it is a matter of race. God grant us the wisdom to tell the difference.
Prayers for the children.
Very sad. Mental health care was cut back by the right to save money, and by the left to “preserve the freedom of expression” of the mentally ill. But if you tallied up the cost of all the people unhospitalized schizophrenics have killed since the 1970s, you’d find it saved no money; and if you knew any of them and how they were imprisoned and terrified by their illness, you’d find it didn’t make them free at all.
Prayers for the family and friends of the murdered couple.
Such a sickening example of the tragic consequences of too much “tolerance” for severely mentally ill individuals in our society.
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