Just after dark Monday night, the sound of gunshots echoed on 15th Avenue South in Columbus.
“I ran (to the back of my house) because my baby was in there, and I wanted to make sure she was OK,” said one neighborhood resident who did not want to give her name.
Just down the street from where the resident was checking on her 5-year-old daughter, Columbus resident Charles “Chris” Moody Jr. lay in a driveway with multiple gunshot wounds.
The shots — the resident who checked on her child counted seven, though another anonymous neighbor told The Dispatch there were “four or five” — occurred at about 7:30 p.m. Within minutes, Columbus police cars lined the street.
Moody, 23, died at the scene, the Columbus Police Department reported. Authorities have not identified a suspect.
“It’s a shock because I’ve never been around something like that,” said the neighbor, who only recently moved to the area. “A boy died.
“He was young too,” she said, adding that she had seen his body lying on the ground.
She said she didn’t know Moody, who lived on the other side of town on McCrary Road. She doesn’t know many of her neighbors, either, and tends to keep to herself, she said. Monday night’s murder has shaken her.
“I ain’t slept all night,” she said.
Friends remember victim
Moody was born and raised in Columbus. His father, Charles C. Moody Sr., worked at Dream Team Barber and Style Shop in downtown Columbus for several years. Moody spent time with his father’s coworkers and often helped clean the store.
“He was like a nephew to all of us that knew him,” said Tyrone Lawrence, who works at the shop, now called Blendz by Dreamteam.
Lawrence said the employees in the shop called him “Little Chris” and tried to mentor him.
“I wish we could mentor him more,” Lawrence said. “Maybe he’s in a better place.”
Moody was the oldest of seven children on his father’s side, Lawrence said. He described Moody as laid back, funny and a hard worker.
Greg Cork, who also works at the shop, described Moody as a “pretty cool, laid back guy.”
“We used to joke around,” Cork said. “He mostly helped out.”
“He was a nice kid,” added Chadrick O’Neal, who used to take his child to get a haircut at Dreamteam. “I never thought he’d be in any kind of negative activity.”
When Moody’s father stopped working at the shop, many of the employees lost touch with him and hadn’t seen him in several years.
“He liked hanging out with us, that’s for sure,” Lawrence said. “And he looked up to all of us. Losing him is really like losing part of the team.”
Shootings are ‘seldom’
The day following the shooting, investigators were back, milling around the 15th Avenue home where Moody was found. Neighbors sitting on their porches or walking down the street as the police worked the scene told The Dispatch they didn’t know Moody and knew nothing about the shooting. A few of them said they heard gunshots and saw the police, but didn’t know anything else.
A few blocks north of Fifth Street from 15th Avenue, residents who had only seen police vehicles drive down the street expressed surprise that a killing had occurred in the area at all. Two residents, neither of whom wanted to be named but who said they’d lived in the area their whole life, said while drug busts are fairly common, shootings are not — especially shootings that end with a death.
“It’s kind of seldom we have shootings on the south side,” one resident said.
Reporter Alex Holloway contributed to this article.
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