On Tuesday morning, there were two funerals on 79th Street between State and Wabash. On the north side, at Carter Temple C.M.E. Church, the Reverend Charles Shyne and his wife, Verlena, lay in state. They were famous all over the south side, so when they were killed by a drunk driver they were eulogized with TV news reports and hymns on the radio.
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“Even though he was a grown man, he had a kid’s heart, he loved to play video games, watched wrestling with us,” said Chris Miller, a teenager from across the courtyard.
For the last few years Landrum had worked as a limousine driver. He was always good for a ride in the Lincoln Town Car. When Carla Popper went into labor, she paged Landrum at 1:30 in the morning, and he drove her to the hospital.
The killers stole only the Sony PlayStation and fled out the front door. Landrum’s friends gave chase. One retrieved a gun from his car and fired at the killers’ brown-and-tan van as it sped through the alley between Columbia and Pratt. The shots broke the windows of a restaurant, and “they may have hit that van too,” said the neighbor, who ran out his back door after hearing the gunshots in the alley. He found Landrum’s friends crouched over his dying body, “asking Kurt, ‘Who is it? What did he look like?’ But Kurt was barely breathing. They told me he flatlined in the ambulance.”
Jett was also the caretaker of a shrine that had appeared in Landrum’s doorway. Dollar store candles burned on the threshold, a Mylar balloon twirled in the wind, flowers were already shriveling. A sheet of poster board over the window served as a giant condolence card: “To a man that showed me how to be a man. Thank you, Kurt.” “R.I.P. Kurt. See you when I get there. T.” A teenage boy Landrum had befriended rode his bike in circles up and down the block, looking morose.
