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.
On Wednesday August 17, 2016, 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.
Next day, police charged 18-year-old Thomas Sims with capital murder in the case, meaning that he could potentially receive the death penalty. He is being held on no bond. It is unclear if he has a lawyer or if he has entered a plea.
Birmingham Police Lt. Sean Edwards told AL.com that it appears Dacus and Sims got into an argument, before the teenage doused him with gasoline and lit him on fire.
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