INDIANAPOLIS — The smoker was going out behind Pa & Ma’s Backyard Barbeque at 2621 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Street on Sunday.
While friends of George Nelson Sr. mourned his death in front of the restaurant, Kirby Moffat tended four racks of ribs behind it.
”If you walked into his place and you needed food, you needed clothes, you needed to just get out of the weather, George was there for you,” said Moffat, wiping the sweat and smoke from his eyes on a 90 degree afternoon. ”He didn’t know any strangers, and he honestly got killed because his heart was a lot bigger than this world.”
IMPD homicide detectives said Nelson Sr. was shot to death in a dispute with a man he hired to place siding on the exterior of his restaurant.
The suspect, said detectives, killed Nelson Sr. when the pair argued over payment for an unfinished job.
The post-church crowds mingled with friends and packed the restaurant’s front room, waiting in line to pick up their Sunday dinners.
”If nothing else, please support this business,” George Nelson, Jr. told the crowd outside before dozens of silver and blue balloons were launched skyward. “This is what he would’ve wanted. Please come and spend money here, man. Spend some money here. Please, I ain’t going nowhere. He did not die in vain. This is where he wanted to be. He went out where he wanted to be at. So, I can hold my head high.”
Nelson Sr.’s daughter Brockelle promised to keep the doors of her parents’ restaurant open.
”This is an institution,” she said. “My dad always talked about establishing institutions for the Black community, and so this is not just a restaurant. This is gonna be a meeting place. This is gonna be a place where children can come, where organizations can come and do business together.
”He employed the unemployable. The felons, the people who didn’t have more than a high school education, the older and the people who was down on they luck, he gave them a job. And he kept them … He raised so many kids. He raised my brother’s friends. He raised my friends. He took kids back and forth to football practice, basketball practice. Even kids that wasn’t his.”
For the second time in a week, IMPD homicide detectives have investigated a murder on the northwest side community bordered by Interstate 65.
For the third time in less than a year, a leader of the Indianapolis African American community has fallen to gunfire, including entertainer Mike Chappel (Mike Treez) and anti-violence activist Ron Frieson (Ron Gee).
Unlike Nelson Sr.’s killing, those homicides remain unsolved.
”Peoples’ egos are so big these days that they just can’t have a simple disagreement and walk away. They have to have the ultimate ‘gimme-gotcha,’ and that’s what that individual did to my father,” said Brockelle Nelson. ”I don’t want what happened to be an indictment on this community because there’s some beautiful people in this neighborhood.”
Moffat said he has lived in the MLK neighborhood his whole life. He added that Nelson Sr. helped him when he was “down and out.”
”I wouldn’t call it gun violence,” he said. “I would call it people violence. We will always find a way to kill each other.”
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