This article originally appeared Dec. 25, 2017.

It was a Wednesday night, Oct. 18, 2017, when Tempe Police Sgt. Ron Elcock said the department got a call of a person down in an apartment complex parking lot near Broadway and Hardy roads.

“This is not an unusual call, whether a person is drunk or just seen in a parking lot somewhere. So when we first got the call it didn’t seem that unusual,” he said.

But when officers responded to the call, they found 38-year-old Corey Lynch had been shot to death.

No one knew why Lynch was there, since he lived in northeast Phoenix.

His sister, Billie, was a year younger than him, so they were really close.

She said Lynch loved music, movies and — most of all — nature.

“We would go up to the rim to do some off-roading, go to Four Peaks, up to Flagstaff. We were just always out.”

Lynch, who had two sons, was a self-employed mechanic and entrepreneur. And he definitely made a case for not judging a book by its cover, Billie said.

“He comes off [as] scary. He was a big, Black guy with a gold grill on the bottom set of his teeth. He would come off thuggish. People would be afraid of him,” she said.

But Billie said he would always help the elderly, disabled couple who he lived near by taking their trash can out to the curb and helping them when their car wouldn’t start.

“He picked that man up and carried him to his apartment.  Then he fixed his car and brought him back out.”

After that, the couple regularly brought him cards and cookies.

“He helped anybody he could. He took his old clothes and shoes to the homeless. He took food to the homeless. He was a 100 percent, genuine love-for-people dude,” Billie said.

You can find more information about this crime here.

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