Retiree Killed in Church Store : Unknown Attacker Clubs Shop Operator to Death

After a drug addict pointed a gun in his face about a year ago, Jorge A. Dailey Sr. decided he would only allow customers he recognized to enter the church thrift store where he lived and worked in South Los Angeles.

But as tightly as he enforced his policy, it was not enough to save his life. The 68-year-old retired restaurant worker was found sprawled Monday on the floor of the musty Calvary Baptist Church Bargain Thrift Store with a deep head wound. He was rushed to Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center, where he died a short time later.

No Motive, No Suspects

Dailey was apparently clubbed, though no motive has been determined and no suspect was in custody late Tuesday, Newton Division homicide detectives said. The victim’s girlfriend, who was in the living quarters of the store when the attack occurred, said the heavy iron security door was ajar after the attack.

Dailey was well known in the neighborhood surrounding the store at Main and 61st streets, say friends and family. Whether he was straightening up the shop or helping to serve a poor family at the nonprofit thrift store, he was a man who rose every morning at 5 and stayed busy all day.

Jorge A. Dailey Jr. said his father did the best he could at a store situated in one of the toughest areas of Los Angeles.

The heavy security bars of the thrift store present a marked contrast to the slogans painted on the outside walls, such as: “Our motto: To have a friend, you must first be a friend” and “The store with a heart.” Dailey tried to live up to those slogans by giving the poor a break on prices when he could, his family and friends say.

Burglars at least twice had tried to break into the store and Dailey’s modest living quarters at the rear, including once when they tried to batter through a door barred by a heavy wooden brace, said Dailey’s girlfriend, Ruth Arnold, 43.

But it was having a pistol waved at him, rather than burglars, that finally got to him. After a young woman threatened him at gunpoint one day, Dailey decided to limit access to store. Yet he refused to leave the area.

“Ever since then, he was afraid but (it) wasn’t going to make him move out,” Arnold said.

Dailey received retirement and Social Security payments from years working as a bus boy in New York and Los Angeles, retiring in 1986 after a stint at the MGM studio commissary, according to his son.

Chose to Stay Active

While his retirement announcement said he planned to “live the good life,” Dailey chose to stay active at the thrift shop operated by an old friend, the Rev. Eddie Ray Thomas of the Greater Mt. Calvary Revival Center.

Arnold said she was with Dailey almost all day Monday. She said she headed out twice to run errands, the second time to the market to get a head of lettuce to make a salad. She said she was making Dailey a dinner of pigs feet and salad as she listened to the television news and he puttered around the shop.

She said she heard sounds of rummaging through a closet and wondered if Dailey was in a bad mood, because he always whistled or hummed as he moved around.

When she didn’t find him at the closet, she walked into the shop and found him on the floor. “I told him to hang on,” she recalled saying as she ran to summon help on the telephone.