Every morning, Seymour Murray would start his day yelling out his kitchen window to his neighbor.
"Hey, old man. Make me breakfast," Murray, 55, would say.
"Make it yourself," Milton Hill would yell back to Murray, who was also his cousin. But then the two would have coffee together in Murray's apartment above a florist shop in the 1500 block of E. North Ave.
On Friday morning, Murray did not get a response from Hill. When Murray took his apartment's back steps to the narrow alleyway, he found Hill slumped against a fence, lying in a pool of blood. He had been shot. His hat lay nearby on the sidewalk.
Hill was the city's eighth homicide victim last week, including a Johns Hopkins researcher stabbed in a Charles Village robbery, two people killed in nearby Station North and a 19-year-old fatally stabbed during a fight in Northeast Baltimore.
"I haven't slept in two days," Murray said Saturday afternoon as the family gathered outside Hill's apartment to make funeral arrangements.
He said he last saw Hill Thursday night as the caretaker at nearby Ark Church headed out to gas up his green scooter, which was missing Friday. Police believe the motive may have been robbery, but Hill's family said the assailant was no one that knew him because "he would've given anything if he had it," said Lennoria Hill-Joseph, Hill's oldest daughter.
"I can't believe this happened," she said as she sat on Murray's steps Saturday, still in shock. "He did nothing but go to work, come home and cut the lawn."
A vigil has been planned for 6 p.m. Monday at the Ark Church at 1263 E. North Ave.
For more than 20 years, Hill worked at the Hamilton Presbyterian Church on Harford Road at a custodian, as well as doing odd jobs and maintaining the lawn around the Ark Church. Murray said Hill would bicycle wherever he could, but if it was too far, he took his scooter.
Hill-Joseph said her father was in good shape for just having his 70th birthday on July 13. "He didn't look his age — except he didn't have any hair," apart from a thin mustache, she said. "He was very active."
He kept busy doing yard work for several clients, mowing grass, pruning bushes and edging the lawn, including that of his other daughter, Tracey Hill-Hedgepeth.
"It's going to hurt me when my grass grows," said Hill-Hedgepeth, who lives in East Baltimore. "You knew his work," walking by, she said. "He took pride in his work."
Hill lived in East Baltimore all of his life. Hill-Joseph said her parents divorced when she was 10 and she wasn't able to see her father as much. But about 15 years ago, they reunited and it was the "most happiest day of my life," she said.
"If I wanted my father, he was always there," she said. Hill-Joseph, the eldest daughter, said he would always call her his "old lady" while he called her sister "Girlie."
On Saturday, after going through his apartment for his burial clothes, Hill-Joseph said she found an old picture of her eldest son under her father's pillow. She said her son, 20, recently graduated from TESST College of Technology and plans to pursue a career in electrical engineering.
"He would tell my son he's an old man now," she said smiling.
Besides his family, Hill mostly kept to himself but his family said he loved animals. He had a pit bull, as well as an aquarium with about a dozen fish. And when he was younger, he kept pigeons.
The 70-year-old also had a collection of Motown records that he loved to play after work, but his favorite artist was Barry White. One of his prides was a gold chain with several diamonds that he always wore. He liked soul food — his daughter would bring over collard greens, fish, potato salad, ham hocks and corn bread several times a week.
"He would get on the scooter and bring his bowls to my house," Hill-Hedgepeth said, or sometimes, she would take food to his house, including last Friday, but she decided to make another stop first.
"I would've passed him. I decided to go later," she said. Then she tried calling. "I thought, where is he?" Then she got the phone call from her daughter.
"My father was my best friend," she said, bracing herself against her car, outside the alley where her father's blood had been washed away.
She said her father would've moved into her old house in another two months, to be closer to clients and to give the dog a yard. She was planning to look at another house for herself this week.
"My heart is so heavy," she said.
As for Murray, he said he is unsure about whether he will stay at his place now that his neighbor is gone.
"I know it's going to be a while until I get myself together," he said. "He was my best friend and my relative — he was a good guy."