Familiar face in Bridgeport killed in neighborhood he loved: ‘I guess the man upstairs needed a handyman’
Linda O’Dette was caught off guard when she saw a picture of her 68-year-old uncle Alva “Al” Besst on her television screen.
She knew he was dead. He was shot in the back of the head Tuesday night while driving in his lifelong neighborhood of Bridgeport. But O’Dette, his only living relative, was busy Wednesday, talking to her uncle’s pastor and worrying she would miss one of the steps necessary after someone dies. She didn’t expect to see his face on the news.
“That’s an OK picture of him,” O’Dette, 54, said through tears. It showed him next to a grill, burger in hand, his beard grown long, side-eyeing the camera.
On Tuesday, Besst was driving his 1985 Lincoln Town Car on 31st Street, which he traveled often to go to his usual gas station or to the First Lutheran Church of the Trinity, when he was shot around 6 p.m. just west of Halsted Street.
Besst was rushed to Stroger Hospital and was pronounced dead less than 45 minutes later from a gunshot wound to the head, according to the Cook County medical examiner’s office.
Police said he was not the target of the shooting. No arrests have been made.
A lifelong Bridgeport resident finds a new home
Besst wasn’t shy about asking someone if they were from Bridgeport when he spotted a new face at church.
“He was like, ‘Who are you?’” Erika Hobbs, 49, recalled from one of their first encounters. She told him she was a member, “Then he was like, ‘Oh, I’m Al. I’ve been here for a long time.’”
Andrew Mack, another church member, said Besst did the same thing when Mack was helping his father cook at the church. Besst asked if Mack lived in Bridgeport. Then he shared stories of growing up there after Mack replied he had family roots in the area.
Besst sometimes wore a scowl, so it took a bit to warm up to him, but he could also erupt in a belly laugh, said Mack, 37.
Besst connected with First Trinity long before he joined the congregation when he started volunteering at God’s Closet, a volunteer-run program that provides free clothing and meals to people in the neighborhood.
He was a scrapper, foraging through alleys for items he could fix up and donate, his niece said. So he stopped by God’s Closet often to drop off things he’d found. That was where Besst met his fiancee, Irene Ford, who volunteered at God’s Closet.
The two started dating and had planned to marry in March 2018, around his late parents’ anniversary, but Ford died in November 2017.
After her funeral, Besst wasn’t eating and lost a lot of weight. Hobbs figured out foods he liked and brought them to the church for him.
“He would just cry, and I would just hold him and hold his hand, and that’s how he and I really became friends,” Hobbs said.
The church was supportive after Ford’s death, said the Rev. Nicolette Peñaranda, who became pastor at First Trinity in July 2019. Besst grew to love the church community and became more involved.
Besst, raised Catholic, originally did not want to join a Lutheran church, but liked being around the people there, Hobbs said.
Before Peñaranda became pastor, Besst became close with an interim pastor, Cheryl Pero. He took deliberate steps, taking classes, asking questions and thinking them over before officially joining.
He eventually became assistant minister to Peñaranda and became part of the church’s council in the last year.
He took his roles seriously and always asked for feedback on his performance. For Peñaranda’s ordination, he wore his best suit and slicked back his hair but told Hobbs he was sweating bullets because he didn’t want to make any mistakes.
Besst also was involved in the Bridgeport Alliance, a community group that operated out of the church, and helped them advocate for a 31st Street bus.
Mack, who is a “fix-it guy,” said he and Besst connected over doing work around the church. One time Besst had a thick piece of warped plywood that he wanted to use to repair a window in the vestibule but Mack said he didn’t know if it was going to work.
Besst had a plan to set up a series of planks on the floor and set full buckets of water on top of them to bend the wood back.
“It worked and that piece of plywood is still up there holding that position in the vestibule,” he said. “I’ll think of Al when I see that and his ingenuity.”
Besst did as much for his community as he could because he deeply cared for it, although he would probably never say that out loud, Peñaranda said.
“He was just a really great display of old Bridgeport,” she said. “Born here, grew up here, unfortunately, died here, but he was just a good person with a good heart who really loved this community and loved his neighbors, even when he didn’t show it on his face.”
Neighborhood native dies where he lived
After the shooting Tuesday, officers went to Besst’s house at Hillock Avenue and Crowell Street.
Throughout Besst’s life, he lived all over Bridgeport, but that two-story brick house was the place he lived the longest and was proudest of, O’Dette said.
He bought it with his mother and she lived with him until she died at 96 in 2004. Besst was a trade school graduate and worked fixing things his whole life.
Besst’s tenant answered the door Tuesday and she called O’Dette.
At first, O’Dette thought about how a shooting isn’t always a death sentence.
Besst himself had survived a CTA bus crash in May 1984 and was told he would never walk again. Instead, “he made a fool out of them. It took him months and months, but he bounced back,” O’Dette said.
Her brother, Robert “Bob” Besst, had died right before Thanksgiving from chronic kidney disease and heart failure.
Al Besst, Bob Besst and O’Dette were close. After her brother died, the family was just O’Dette, her uncle and his spoiled calico cat, Babbee.
The 23-year-old cat, whom Besst bottle-fed when he found her, died days before the shooting.
After the shooting, as soon as a doctor came out and said, “Unfortunately,” O’Dette knew where the conversation was going.
“Now, I have nobody,” she said.
The church organized a GoFundMe campaign to raise funds for Besst’s funeral expenses and as support for O’Dette.
Besst was aware of Chicago’s violence and the history of Bridgeport, Mack said. He had offered up prayers at Sunday services to help leaders and communities find a way to deal with violence.
“It’s an absolute tragedy to see somebody who was so full of life to be taken so abruptly,” Mack said. “Al wanted the world to be a better place. He didn’t like the violence that happened in the city, and he believed he had been doing his small part to make the city a better place.”
O’Dette said she has two consolations: One, Besst likely didn’t suffer. Two, he must have gotten “one hell of a welcome committee.”
“I guess the man upstairs needed a handyman,” she said.
Twitter @paigexfry
