George Shakes Good Samaritan’s Trust

Terry Lynn Smith first saw Johnaton George last Saturday morning sitting in the car of a mutual friend outside her home. Asked to take the stranger in, Smith did not think twice.

“I looked at it as me helping someone, so I wasn’t scared,” she said Tuesday from her small white wooden house, where George spent four nights. “I thought the Lord would bless me for that. The Lord is on my side, and I feel nothing will happen to me.”

George, who introduced himself as “Charlie,” slept on her couch at night. By day, he looked for chores to take on, fixing the plumbing, helping with yard work and tackling other jobs.

George had been introduced by Eli Pouncey, who vouched for his good character.

“I trust Eli. I’ve worked with him before,” said Smith, who declined to say where Pouncey lives or to say much more about him.

Smith’s mother, Almenteen Givens, who lives in a stucco house behind her daughter’s home, supported Smith’s decision to invite George into her home. Givens lives with Smith’s 8-year-old daughter, Kenyhata Cross.

“I take them all in,” said Givens, who says she suffers from epilepsy but has worked as a volunteer teacher’s aide. “I don’t ask questions. What they need, I give.”

Givens was impressed with George.

“He was so polite, kind and intelligent,” she said.

That Givens and Smith would accept George into their homes is not unusual, say neighbors, who describe the family as religious and trusting of anyone in need of help.

Stanley Smith, a neighbor who lives a block away and is not related to Terry Lynn Smith, said he has stayed with Smith and Givens in the past.

Upon meeting George, Stanley Smith said he appeared “nervous and tense” but was “a nice guy and looked like a football player.”

George told Smith his truck had recently been stolen. He appeared at the Compton home carrying only a gym bag and a plastic box.

Smith said nobody was aware that George was a fugitive until Compton police knocked on the front doors of her and her mother’s houses Tuesday morning. Authorities said everyone in the house was awake, watching television. Smith said they all were asleep.

Givens said police ordered her to put her hands up, frightening her granddaughter, who began crying. “She had never seen so many guns,” Givens said.

Both Givens and her granddaughter were ordered to lie face down on the concrete in front of their house.

Terry Lynn Smith said she and Stanley Smith were also ordered onto the floor inside her house and she first knew that the incident was over when she heard an officer say, “We’ve got him.”

“I was crying and upset,” Terry Lynn Smith said. “I could not believe this happened.”

The whole episode has made Smith, who is unemployed, and Givens wonder about whom they invite into their homes.

“I’ll take people in, but I’ll be more careful and ask more questions,” Givens said.

Her daughter is even more skeptical about being a Good Samaritan.

“It doesn’t pay,” she said. “This whole world is wicked. I won’t be as nice as I’ve been.”