Growing up in Mississippi, Thomas ”Jerry” Hodges could pick home-grown peas and walk the land at his grandfather`s farm, but what he really wanted was urban grit.
”Our parents died when we were young,” said his younger brother, Cecil. ”I guess we just sort of migrated away; didn`t seem to like farm work.”
When the time came to settle, the Hodges brothers moved separately to Chicago, where they tried to replicate their tight-knit rural experience in the South Side.
They thought neighbors ought to know one another.
They never thought Hodges, 69, of the 8600 block of Maryland Avenue, would be shot and killed in his own garage by a man who friends and neighbors speculate knows the neighborhood and may even live among them.
”He`s somebody`s brother, somebody`s son, somebody among us,” said Jules Packnett, a Chatham resident and Thomas Hodges` neighbor from 1960 to 1975. ”He`s catchable.”
Pullman Area detectives said Wednesday that they did not know for sure that the suspect lives in the area.
No suspects have been arrested, they said.
Hodges was killed July 22. On Wednesday, friends, neighbors and community activists gathered to announce a $3,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of his killer.
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Police have said they believe the same man may have also killed William Patterson, 67, outside his brother`s home in Avalon Park on Aug. 17, and Jimmy Bramlett, 43, slain Aug. 2 outside his house on East 89th Street.
”I`m sure he`s the same guy,” said Patterson`s brother, James, who attended the announcement along with about 35 other people in front of the Chatham Business Association on South Cottage Grove Avenue.
They talked about Hodges, the former president of the Chatham Block Club Association, a retired electronics salesman for Sears, Roebuck and Co. and a former supervisor at the South Side Ford Motor Co. plant.
Packnett, 34, said he used to do yard work for his neighbor.
”He didn`t need me to mow his lawn or shovel his snow, but it was a job for a young man in the area,” said Packnett.
”It helped to know that you could make money there on the block. Mr. Hodges was always the guy that you could depend on.”
Hodges` widow, Mary Lorraine, 64, said she will not leave the house that she and her husband moved into in July 1963, though she had thought about moving before her husband`s death.
”He was a happy, satisfied person,” she said. ”I wanted to move away from there a long time ago because I thought the community was changing and I didn`t like that. But (now) I couldn`t just say, boom, I`m moving. The house is paid for. You don`t just throw it away.”
Thomas Hodges was an incessant fixer-upper who was cleaning garage windows the morning he died.
Friends such as Packnett say they are angered that the sanctity of home and community are no longer respected.
”It used to be there was an order to life, where the older respect the younger and young kids didn`t have guns,” Packnett said.
”Life has been made cheap. I used to have a series of eyes looking out for me and Mr. Hodges was one of those eyes.”