Douglas Moody might have gone on living if he had stayed home in Cincinnati.
But last week he came to visit his mama, and now he's dead.
To get here from Ohio, Moody, 31, rode the Greyhound all night. He arrived in Greenwood around 10 o'clock Saturday morning.
"I hadn't seen him in three years," says Gracy Moody, a soft-spoken woman with red-rimmed eyes and brown hair flecked with gray. "We laughed and talked and cried and hugged, because we were glad to see each other again."
Gracy Moody shed tears of joy that morning. She could not know that before 48 hours had passed, she would be crying tears of a very different kind.
Douglas Moody was born in Greenwood and grew up here. He attended Amanda Elzy High School and graduated from a high school in East St. Louis.
He moved to Cincinnati to live with his father. He worked as a meat inspector for Preferred Foods in nearby Fairfield, Ohio. "He had just gotten a promotion to supervisor," his mother says proudly.
He planned to stay in Greenwood only a few days, but he was looking forward to renewing old acquaintances with friends and family. He was especially looking forward to spending time with his mother.
"He was a good boy," Gracy Moody says. "He didn't run the streets, because he didn't live here. He wasn't the kind to fight. He was special to his people, always doing something to help somebody.
"There wasn't anything you could ask him to do that he wouldn't try to help if he could."
Sunday, Moody went to see one of his cousins. The visit ended around midnight. On his way home, he stopped to get a box of chicken to take with him.
What happened after that remains unclear.
Greenwood resident Sammie Johnson reported to police that around 10:30 p.m. Sunday he was talking on a pay phone on Johnson Street when he was robbed at gunpoint by three young males.
Police now believe that the same three young men who robbed Johnson later shot and killed Moody as he walked home. He died near the intersection of Main and Henry streets, less than half a mile from his mother's house. He was shot in the back.
Police speculate that robbery was the motive. If so, Douglas Moody lost his life for a necklace, a watch, a ring and small change. But it would be just as true to say he was killed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Gracy Moody learned of her son's death from a security guard at the Double Quick store on Main Street who knocked on her door.
"I jumped in my car and drove over to where he was. The ambulance was there and the lights were flashing, but I think he was already dead by then," she says.
On the ground beside Moody's body lay a box of chicken.
"When I saw him," says a dry-eyed Gracy Moody, "I couldn't do nothing but holler. He was my child….
"He never bothered nobody. He never got in fights. Why did they have to shoot him?"
Had Douglas Moody lived, he would have been 32 today.
