Her mother must have been returning from another visit with the cats.

That is Tina Crum's best guess, even though she had asked her mother, Garnet Jones, to abandon the nightly trips to East Gates Street and Parsons Avenue on the South Side.

There, stray cats would gather under the porches of vacant row houses, waiting for her. There, Jones checked on them, offering food and putting medicinal drops in their ears if it looked like they had mites.

"It was a porch where all the homeless cats would go in, and they would cuddle up at night," Crum, 46, said.

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Crum told her 62-year-old mother these trips to her old neighborhood weren't safe. The trips meant a bus ride both ways and walking the streets alone after dark. And not everyone in the old neighborhood appreciated Jones feeding the strays. Some angrily accused her of attracting vermin and had called the police on her at least once.

Her mother was unswayed.

"She said the cats wouldn't come earlier," Crum said. "They came at a certain time of night. Every night she did it about that time."

Early March 31, Crum's fears about her mother's nightly trips were realized in a way she hadn't imagined.

Jones' body was found about 12:30 a.m. at the Driving Park Community Center. But Columbus police believe she was struck by a car several hours earlier and six blocks to the west, at East Whittier Street and Fairwood Avenue, where Jones would step off the bus for the walk home. The moving car dragged or otherwise carried her — police aren't sure exactly how — until she tumbled free at the community center grounds.

Police have found the car, a 2006 silver Cadillac STS, and identified the driver as 44-year-old Lequan A. Hedrick of the Northeast Side. Sgt. Brooke Wilson, supervisor of the accident investigation unit, said Wednesday that the case against Hedrick has been turned over to prosecutors, who will present it to a grand jury.

Questions have hounded Crum since her mother's death. If the driver had reported the collision and summoned help right away, would her mother have survived? How could the driver have left her like that, in the dark and the rain?

"When I got her clothes back (from the coroner), they was just soaking wet," she said.

Jones raised Crum and her sister, Ella, as a single mother.

"She worked job after job to support us," Tina Crum said. "We didn't have much family, but it was all three of us all the time."

Jones took her daughters to fairs, enrolled them in modeling classes, and treated them to dinners at the landmark York Steakhouse on West Broad Street.

Ella Crum died unexpectedly 16 years ago, at the age of 31. Tina Crum wants to bury her mother, who did not want to be cremated, beside Ella, but so far she has hasn't raised enough money to cover the cost. She has arranged for any donations to be sent directly to Jerry Spears Funeral Home. The Hilltop funeral home can be reached at 614-274-5092.

"It's eating me up inside, knowing my mom is still laying in that funeral home," Crum said.

She hopes that homes are found for her mother's 10 cats and two dogs. Most, she said, are up for adoption through Columbus Humane.

Jones had looked after her extended family of street cats for years. When she still lived at East Gates and Parsons but was laid up with a leg injury, Jones used ropes to lower bowls of cat food out her upstairs windows to the waiting strays. Her concern for them persisted even after she moved from the neighborhood, her daughter said.

"Why didn't he just stop?" she said of the driver. "If he had just stopped, maybe he could have gotten her to the hospital."

At the usual time after dark on Tuesday night, beneath the porches of empty brick row homes at East Gates and Parsons, nothing stirred in the sweep of a flashlight beam.

It should have been expected. By then, more than two weeks had passed since the woman had come to this place, bearing food and medicine and simple kindness.

There was little reason to wait here anymore, and there was not a cat in sight.

tdecker@dispatch.com

@Theodore_Decker