CLARKSVILLE, TN (CLARKSVILLE NOW) – “Every morning for seven years, he would come into the gas station to see me,” Crystal Sheffield said over the phone as she rewatched security camera footage of her conversations with David Moore.
“Seven years of telling me stories and jokes,” she continued. “He was just so important in my life and I’m devastated. I’m so devastated.”
The previous weekend, Moore had been strangled at the Salvation Army emergency shelter. A suspect was arrested, and the case is working its way through the court system. Sheffield was in disbelief as to why anyone would kill her friend.
A man of routine
Moore liked routine, and he kept a strict one for the last seven years.
The 79-year-old woke up around 5:30 a.m., had his morning cup of coffee at the Salvation Army where he had been staying for several months, and then got on the city bus.
Around 8:30 a.m. most mornings, he would get off the bus at the Westfield Court stop and walk to the Shell Sudden Service gas station on Wilma Rudolph Boulevard, where Sheffield is the manager.
He would talk with Sheffield for 30 minutes to an hour and then would buy scratch-off lottery tickets.
After checking in with her, he would head over to the nearby McDonald’s to get another cup of coffee. Moore would then get back on the bus, and would spend his days at the Clarksville-Montgomery County Public Library.
His routine abruptly stopped on May 2 when he was killed. And the odd thing, Sheffield said, was that Moore had told her he felt something would eventually happen to him.
“He believed some conspiracy theories, and felt watched sometimes and that’s why he told me personal information and his schedule, so that in the event that something happened to him, I could help retrace his steps,” Sheffield said. “One of the last things he told me was that he was going to die on the streets.”
7 years of jokes
Sheffield compared her relationship with Moore to one she might have had with her own grandfather, who died of colon cancer when she was young.
“Seven years of telling me jokes and stories,” Sheffield said. “Who makes that a part of their routine for seven years to come and see someone you don’t really know?”
The pair did get to know each other, and well. Sheffield said she’d talk about Moore at home, and her five children knew him by name. They all had met him at some point over the last seven years.
Sheffield saw Moore just two days before he was killed. He gave her a four-leaf clover that he had picked from the grass outside the gas station.
“I had the clover laminated for my wallet,” she said.
While their friendship was initially grounded in Moore’s stories, it was the often corny jokes he told and the sweet gestures that Sheffield said never failed to brighten her days.
“I’d ask him, ‘Where are you going today?’ And almost every day, he would say, ‘There’s these two boys I’m going to go see: Here and There,'” she said with a curt laugh.
Another one Sheffield said made her laugh was the last joke he’d ever tell her.
“He asked me, ‘How do you know the ocean is friendly?’ I said I didn’t know, and he responded, ‘It waves,'” she said.
“He was someone who loved other people,” she continued. “He meant something to someone, and I don’t want that to go down and it be, ‘Oh, he was just homeless.’ No, he was a disabled veteran with a good heart.”
God almighty’s cruelty
Underneath the jokes that David told, there was always an inherent risk to his health.
“When I first met David, he told me stories about his childhood. He told me all kinds of stuff, and he would laugh. When he laughs or smiles is when he has seizures,” Sheffield said.
Sheffield said she could tell when he’d have his seizure, and since he had asked that she not call for medical help because it was too expensive, she would rub his back and just talk to him.
“Last time I saw him, he had a seizure because he said I tickled him pink. He leaned over the counter and I just held him there so he would not hit the ground,” she said.
To help him seek treatments, Sheffield had been helping coordinate rides for Moore down to the VA hospital in Nashville.
“He used to tell me, ‘Isn’t it funny how the God almighty punished me because I like to make people laugh?'” Sheffield said.
Sheffield said the cruelest of them all, however, was the way his life ended.
“He touched my soul and was just the sweetest man. He had the babiest blue eyes, and he deserves the world if you ask me,” Sheffield said.
After the funeral, Sheffield was able to meet one of Moore’s daughters, who said that despite his daily lottery ticket, at one point in his life, Moore had actually hated gambling.
She left his favorite scratch-off ticket under his cremation box.