As his neighbor Helen McComb told AL.com, “He’s been here forever. People here loved Mr. Gene. He was very sweet to all of the children. He kept our neighborhood clean.”

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After his wife passed away in 2005, he cared for his now 60-year-old disabled son in the house, alone.

“Good man. Uncomparably good man,” Robert Stanley, a relative, told WBRC.

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His son Gary Dacus credits his own success to his father’s example.

“He taught me good rules and I have a lot of my father in me,” he told AL.com. “I’m a successful person for that … He was the most kindhearted gentleman you ever met. He never met a stranger, and he helped anybody he could.”

On Wednesday, neighbors alerted Stanley, a neighbor and relative of Dacus’s, that they smelled smoke and saw fire coming from the back yard of Dacus’s house. They thought maybe his RV had caught fire, or that someone had set fire to it — police said witnesses had seen a young black man running through a nearby alleyway with a red gasoline jug.

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Stanley sent his son to investigate.

But the camper wasn’t on fire. What he found was far more shocking and horrifying.

It was Dacus’s body, in the back yard of the home he lived in for more than 50 years, engulfed in flames.

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“My son was the one that found him,” Stanley told WBRC. “The neighbors said they thought the camper was on fire. He went around back to see if the camper was on fire, and it was Gene.”

McComb, a neighbor, saw Stanley’s son emerge from the yard.

“I could see something burning,” she told AL.com. “Then a guy ran out yelling somebody had burned up Mr. Gene.”

Dacus was pronounced dead at the scene by Birmingham Fire and Rescue, WCMH reported.

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Video taken by WIAT shows the place where his body was found — now just a charred black hole starkly contrasting with the bright green grass surrounding it.

On Thursday, police charged 18-year-old Thomas Sims with capital murder in the case, meaning that he could potentially receive the death penalty. He is being held on no bond, according to AL.com. It is unclear if he has a lawyer or if he has entered a plea.

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Birmingham Police Lt. Sean Edwards told AL.com that it appears Dacus and Sims got into an argument, before the teenage doused him with gasoline and lit him on fire.

“It’s disheartening to see someone this young go to this level of violence,” Edwards said. “To me, what he did to that elderly gentleman is evil at its finest.”

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As police are awaiting autopsy reports, it’s unclear if Dacus had died before he was burned, but his son Gary hoped so.

“The only thing I can hope to God for is that he was dead before he was burned,” Gary told the newspaper. “You expect your parents to die before you, but to die a horrendous death like that is unimaginable. My father’s death is a tragic loss. The community lost one of its pillars.”

In a news conference, Birmingham Police Chief A.C. Roper said “This homicide shocks the conscience of any reasonable person. Our hearts are hurting for the victim, his family and our community. The suspect actually confessed to this crime but we have not received any logical justification to explain what happened.”

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One factor that might point toward a motive is Dacus’s missing truck.

Three weeks before Dacus’s death, his car was stolen from his house, and it hasn’t been recovered. He was worried his pickup truck, a 1999 white Dodge Ram with a blue hood, would meet the same fate, so he drove it onto his lawn, AL.com reported.

The truck went missing around the time of his death, though it’s unclear exactly when. Police are searching for it and have said the capital murder charge stems from the theft of the truck. They also are searching for a second suspect.