Jeffery Frazier: “Our Angel”
Frazier’s family and friends said the young man, 34 and known as “Tank,” was autistic, and loved throughout the community. He took his neighbors’ trash cans to the curb, and made a regular job out of collecting bottles and cans from the streets, all the way from Ryan to Mound. Merchants in the neighborhood knew exactly when he was coming to clear their areas.
“He loved doing that,” said Frazier’s mother, Charlotte Ann Frazier. “He graduated from the Burger Center in Garden City, a school for autistics. All his teachers were so proud of him. He never missed one day of school, and he never missed one Sunday in the Open Doors Baptist Church and Greater Concord church. He was our angel.”
Frazier had three brothers and two sisters. He was also a friend of some of Willingham’s family members. Both men grew up in the neighborhood where the chase took place.
A doctor from an adjacent clinic, whose grounds Frazier used to clean up, tried to save him as he lay dying on the street. A friend of Willingham said he found cans and bottles in the street near where Frazier was hit, after he had been taken away by EMS.
May 27, 2009 8:59 am