DETROIT — Four dazed men on Tuesday sit in the front room of an old home in Detroit's Woodbridge Historic District neighborhood heated by a wood stove.

Chris O'Brien, 48, who owns the home on the northeast corner of Lysander and Avery, and his roommate of 10 years, 60-year-old David Hilgendorf watched a man die on their sidewalk less than 24 hours ago.

It wasn't a random person, but O'Brien's friend of nearly three decades, Chris Best of Redford, he says, the man he "partied down" with at Woodstock '94 watching Metallica, Aerosmith, Nine Inch Nails, "all the hot bands at the time."

Best was shot and killed in front of the house about 7:20 p.m. Monday.

Best, a single man in his late-50s, said O'Brien, was a hard-working musician who lived in Redford, played keyboards, in the past operated the soundboard at the defunct Fourth Street Fair and kept a day job working IT.

Best "cooled his jets a little" over the last decade or so; he stopped drinking, but maintained a lust for life and music, says O'Brien.

Tim Kethman, 53, a friend who lives nearby and was visiting Tuesday, said Best was a "nice, unassuming, gentle guy; I think they just killed him because they could."

O'Brien and Best, the eldest of eight children, met nearly 30 years ago in southwest Detroit and never lost touch.

Best recently hired O'Brien, a contractor, to work on his home in Redford after a tree fell on it; he was delivering a portion of the payment Monday evening.

It didn't look like Best intended to stay long, the men said, because he brought his dog, "Maxi," and left her in the car.

On Tuesday, Maxi was sleeping on O'Brien's bed with a gray cat. The men brought her inside after the ambulance took Best away.

Witnesses said the suspected shooters drove south on Avery after opening fire.

"That's it," said O'Brien, "they killed him, they murdered him... They lit him up with an AK-47."

O'Brien, Hilgendorf and Kethman, speculate that it might have been a robbery, but they are unsure how the attackers would know that Best had cash on him, unless he was stalked.

Police said the shooter or shooters fired an AK-47, according to O'Brien.

On Tuesday, yellow police crime scene tape still clung to bushes where police had blocked the sidewalk Monday. Blood was visible in the frozen grass along the sidewalk.

Inside the house, there is more police tape on a messy desk.

Empty Busch Light cans and packs of Pall Mall cigarettes sit on the mantle. The men, two sipping cans of beer, sit in chairs and recall the chaos that erupted about 7:20 p.m. Monday.

Plaster dust covers the walls and floor, exploded from the walls and strewn by more than a dozen bullets that pierced the home, some of the bullets passing through windows, walls, floors and pictures.

"There was a pow! Pow! Pow! It was crazy," said O'Brien. "Glass was flying everywhere. I didn't know what to think.

"It was like smokey, with dust and glass."

"I didn't know what to think either," said David Hilgendorf, 60, who's lived in the home with O'Brien for about 10 years. "And then when I see the bullet holes coming through the window, I said nuh-uh, they hammered the house."

The men took cover and after several minutes O'Brien said he grabbed his revolver.

It's hanging in a holster with several long guns nearby.

When they got outside, they realized who the victim on the sidewalk was.

O'Brien said Best "was dying," shot through the chest.

"I go, 'Oh my God, Chris,'" said O'Brien, "and I grabbed him by the head."

On the mantle is a small picture of O'Brien and Best sitting on the front porch of another rustic home he owns in northern Michigan.

"At least he saw a loving, friendly face before he died," says Kethman.

The Woodbridge Historic District residents say their neighborhood, though riddled with theft — auto theft and property crime — is generally pretty safe.

"It's hard times, the whole city," said Kethman. "It's getting harder and tougher and harder and tougher, man."

From another chair, Hilgendorf chimes in.

"It's the arsonists, the thieves, the crooks, the killers, the muggers," he says, "they're all roaming the streets here in the city and they have free range."

O'Brien walks out to the front porch, his Busch beer in hand.

"It's a tragedy," he says. "I don't know what to think."



Video: O'Brien explains what happened during the shooting of his friend Monday: