After he sank into depression in the early 1980s and lost his job at the old Ambassador Hotel, his sisters got him to see a therapist. But it didn't work. In desperation, they tried to get him committed, but he skipped out.
And so John Robert McGraham's sisters settled into a pattern: visiting their brother on the streets of Mid-Wilshire whenever they could. They brought him food, money and clothing. They brought their children to see their "Uncle Johnny." The sisters were pleasantly surprised to learn that the neighborhood -- with poor immigrants and merchants -- also looked out for him.
Then last week, someone threw gasoline from a red canister on the homeless man who seemed rooted to the corner of 3rd and Berendo streets, in a densely populated, diverse neighborhood west of downtown. Neighbors rushed to save him in the Thursday night darkness. But his body had been charred, and he died.
On Sunday evening, more than 200 people crowded the sidewalk and spilled over into 3rd Street for a memorial to McGraham. Many of them wept as dozens of votive candles glowed on the concrete. McGraham's sister Susanne McGraham-Paisley brought pictures of her brother.
One showed him in front of a slot machine at the Lady Luck in Las Vegas. With his curly top and clean-shaven looks, he was a looker, said an elderly Central American immigrant woman.
"Ay, how handsome he looks," said Mari Umana, with a note of awe and sadness.
"He was loved here, seriously," a woman told another bystander in the throng.
"Remember his eyes?" a young woman asked. "I really hope they get whoever did this."
But police Sunday had no new information about who might have killed the 55-year-old man, LAPD Officer Karen Smith said.
As the outrage over his gruesome death settled in, so did testimonials about the disheveled homeless man with a Buddha-like frame known in the neighborhood as "John," "Mr. John" or "Grimley." People spoke about his piercing blue eyes and his kind, quiet manner. The owners of the local convenience store spoke about how conscientious he was.
"He never paid a penny less," said Anjana Bhowmick, owner of Bengal Liquor store.
McGraham's place in his neighborhood gave some relief to his family.
"I feel that it has been a great comfort to myself and my brothers and sisters to know that he was not alone, unnoticed, untouched by other humans -- because that is what we had imagined," McGraham-Paisley said in an e-mail to The Times.
