Friends and family of Ellison McCall Jr., who was brutally beaten and set on fire after earlier intervening in a bar fight in Northeast Baltimore, held a vigil Sunday to celebrate his life and press for answers on the year anniversary of his death, The Sun's Tricia Bishop reports.
"This was a good guy," said friend Floyd Benton Jr. "He had no enemies."
McCall, 30, was working as a bartender at the New Haven Lounge a year ago and got into an altercation with some patrons, friends told The Baltimore Sun at the time. It was believed that the men later followed McCall from the club to a house on the 1400 block of Homestead St. in the Coldstream-Homestead-Montebello neighborhood, where they beat him, doused him in gasoline and set him ablaze.
Firefighters responded to a call about 6:15 a.m. and found McCall lying in a front room. No one has been charged in McCall's case, and the investigation is still open, police said.
His friends gathered Sunday night on the lawn of the house where he died, now boarded up, standing close to one another as the temperatures fell toward freezing. They held lit candles and bunches of snow-white balloons.
"El was a good man gone too soon," Benton said to the group of about 20 people. "It's just crazy that he's not here no more. … He could light a room up, just make you smile."