Two green plastic lawn chairs, empty now, with a matching table between them, were the only adornments on a concrete porch as threatening clouds gathered overhead.
A stone’s throw away sat a red Corvette where the bodies of David Wayne Graham, 39, and his son, Easton Blayde Graham, 3, were found by Murray County Sheriff Howard Ensley around 8:30 that morning.
The cause of their deaths was undetermined as of late Tuesday, Ensley said.
“Wayne’s mother became concerned when he didn’t show up to drop her grandson off,” Ensley said. “She went out there to see what had happened, but didn’t look in the car because it was parked away from the house. She called us and when I went out there they were both in the car dead.”
When Ensley was asked if the Corvette’s motor was running at 2613 Old Highway 411 South when he arrived, he replied it was not.
“It’s still under investigation, and Joe Montgomery with the (Georgia Bureau of Investigation) is assisting us,” he said. “The bodies have been sent to the state crime lab, so we should know more soon.”
The Grahams’ next door neighbor, Raymond Prenzlow, was shaken by the news after he got off work.
“He was a nice little kid, a real friendly kid,” he said of Easton. “The first time I met him he came right up and started voluntarily talking to me. My daughter went over and played with the little girl there and the boy.”
He said Wayne Graham had a tendency to “keep to himself” but they talked on occasion and he “seemed like a good person.”
“We did the same kind of work, he worked in a machine shop, but he never said where,” said Prenzlow, who only lived next door to the Grahams for around six months. “He was always playing with his kids and riding the four-wheeler. He sold his truck and bought that Corvette maybe one, two weeks ago.
“Everybody’s strange in their own way, I guess, unless you know them and spend time with them every day. It’s bad about him, but it’s terrible about the little boy.”
Across the road, neighbors Jimmy and Tina Wilson said they thought Graham lived at the location for around five years. They said they saw Graham and his son at nearby Mount Pisgah Baptist Church on Sunday.
“He’s known me all his life, because he’s older than me,” Tina Wilson said of Graham as tears began to stream down her cheeks. “He’d been to church a couple of times, and we talked to him on Sunday. It seemed like he had a lot weighing on him. The little boy was so happy at church, just to be around people. Wayne told me he had been crying a lot because the only mother he ever knew had left.”
Jimmy Wilson said after they saw Wayne Graham at church Sunday they went and bought him a gift.
“We got him a Bible, an easy-reading Bible,” he said with red-rimmed eyes. “I don’t guess he got an opportunity to read it, but I sure wish he would have.”
An employee at Peeples Funeral Home in Chatsworth said the mortuary will be handling burial arrangements when the bodies are returned from the crime lab.
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