More and more, Jerry tried to engage me.

Even in the harsh business of newspaper reporting, it’s rare to be called upon to write about the violent death of someone you know.

Almost by definition, crime victims are generic, strangers in spite of the journalistic detail that seems to make them come to life. They’re a 39-year-old sheet metal shop owner, a 17-year-old gang member or a 67-year-old former prizefighter.

Jerry Hudson was a 46-year-old transient. Or that’s what his three paragraphs in The Times would have said if I hadn’t known him personally.

How well I knew Jerry is hard to say. The relationship wasn’t my doing. Jerry, and sometimes his friends, hung out in the parking lot at the rear of the building I work in at Brand Boulevard and Harvard Street.

Street people are hard to get a fix on. Alone, they’re quite helpless and sympathetic, especially Jerry, who was slight, sandy-haired and partly crumpled in posture. In groups, they can be intimidating. So when Jerry was having a beer with friends, I’d reflexively make a wide turn around them.

Jerry understood that. Usually he would holler out a greeting intended to say, “Don’t worry, pal. My friends are OK.”

Once he was sitting on the curb in my parking space. Our eyes met as I turned in and he stood and moved aside. But he gave me a friendly smile anyway.

More and more, Jerry tried to engage me. He’d step forward as I got out of my car, or face me in the alley and start a soliloquy. I always figured it was his prelude to putting out his palm, but I never waited to find out.

One day recently he caught me. The subject on his mind was the police officers who seemed to think he was drinking.

“Do I look drunk to you, sir?” he asked.

I couldn’t tell. He seemed articulate and observant. He noticed instantly when my eyes drifted behind the dumpster where five bottles, each wrapped snugly in a brown paper bag, stood in a neat row.

“Oh, those have been there for a long time,” he protested like a child.

He didn’t ask for money. I was beginning to see that he wanted something more valuable than the change in my pocket. He was after my time. I didn’t have enough of it that day to pursue my dawning impression that Jerry might have something to offer in return.

It’s too bad because Jerry was bludgeoned to death last week as he lay in his sleeping bag in a stairwell of Glendale Presbyterian Church.

A suspect has been arrested and charged. The prosecution’s theory is that 35-year-old transient Robert (Bobby) Radzikowski heard that Jerry was carrying Social Security money and hit him over the head with a brick to take it away.

That’s a sad enough tale, but even sadder is what Jerry’s death has dredged up about his life. The truth is that he was no transient. He had what passed for a home and he had friends whose loyalty went back a long time.

One of them was Barbara Boyd, the disingenuously sour keeper of the Glendale Library’s special collections, among which is the world’s largest collection on cats.

Boyd got to know Jerry five or six years ago through his dog named Dawg, a snow white, short-haired, whippy-tailed terrier type that was both friendly and left-handed.

“He always high-fived and waved at you with his left,” Boyd said.

Dawg followed Jerry everywhere. Jerry kept Dawg’s coat pristine with baths at the faucet behind Lamps Plus. Boyd brought food for Dawg. Jerry and his sidekick, George, stowed it, along with a small collection of clothes, in the stairwell of the church, across the street from the library.

It wasn’t technically their home. Associate Pastor Greg Roth said the church does not allow the homeless to sleep on its property. He said Jerry often said he was keeping the grounds clean in exchange for the hospitality.

“I would say, ‘You don’t have to do that. You don’t have permission to stay where you are staying,’ ” Roth said.

That charade went on about six years. Roth, meanwhile, was nudging Jerry to better his situation by applying for benefits.

“For years, he said he was too proud to go on Social Security disability,” Roth said.

Change was upon Jerry, though. A couple of years ago, Jerry lost Dawg while in the Veterans Administration Hospital for surgery. Dawg ended up in the pound and another street dweller bought him for $10. Jerry’s friend George died too.

Boyd thought that he went downhill after that. He started drinking more. He was arrested and ordered to attend Alcoholics Anonymous.

Then a romantic interest intervened.

I saw her a few times, hanging out with the men in the parking lot. I hadn’t noticed they were sweethearts, but they were planning marriage.

“I said he had to get the marriage license and he had to have a place to stay before I would perform the service,” Roth said.

By combining her modest income with his Social Security, they thought that they could just make it. So Jerry applied and got killed for it.

Next week, the church will demolish the annex building where Jerry slept. It was long planned. Jerry was warned and didn’t mind.

He was expecting to move on.