When he first answered the phone, Charles Hall could only hear stuttering. Then he heard his brother Willie gasping for breath.
"Charlie," his brother said in a raspy voice. "Roy f---ing shot me." Then he described where he was and said, "I love you" before ending the call.
As he lay in the woods bleeding to death Monday afternoon, Willie Hall also called 911 and identified his killer as Roy Garland, 61, his drinking buddy and neighbor.
Police said Tuesday they didn't yet have a motive in the shooting that has left Hall's family bewildered.
"Willie and Roy don't ever fight," said Charles Hall, who was also his brother's roommate on Curtis Avenue in Kenner.
Garland remained Tuesday in the Jefferson Parish Correctional Center booked with second-degree murder. His bond had not been set.
Garland has a lengthy criminal history, including a previous murder conviction, said Sgt. Brian McGregor, Kenner police spokesman. Most notably, he had been sentenced to life imprisonment in 1975 for shooting a man to death in Kenner, but his sentence had been commuted by then Gov. Edwin Edwards.
When police got to Hall, in a wooded area about a five-minute walk north of his home, he was unconscious, McGregor said. Despite efforts to resuscitate him, Hall was pronouced dead on the scene.
The cause of death was multiple distant-range gunshot wounds to the torso, according to the Jefferson Parish coroner's office.
Police arrested Garland less than two hours after Hall died. He was located a few blocks from the crime scene still wearing the bloody clothes Hall had described to dispatchers, McGregor said.
Hall, his brother Charles and Garland were drinking buddies who lived a couple blocks apart. Charles Hall said his brother and Garland had originally met in a Florida prison 10 years ago, where Hall was serving nine months for a probation violation. Charles Hall didn't know why Garland was incarcerated.
Charles Hall said he had been with the other two men shortly before his dying brother called him but had to leave to run an errand. "We were laughing, joking around 45 minutes before I got the call," he said.
McGregor said a residential video camera photographed the two men walking together down Garland's street within the hour before the incident happened.
On Tuesday morning, Hall's brothers were inspecting orange police markings in the isolated area where Hall's body was found.
"He was a kind person," said older brother Roy Douglas Hall Jr., who periodically broke into tears when describing his sibling. "If you didn't have a shirt he'd take his off his back."
And Charles said he and his brother regularly helped Garland cut his grass, because the older man doesn't see or walk well. He has a glass eye and his face was disfigured after he was shot in the face with a shotgun in 1991, Charles Hall said. Police said at the time that it was a domestic dispute over a woman, according to newspaper reports.
That was also the reason behind the shooting that put Garland behind bars in 1975. Then 26, Garland shot Thomas Burns, 38, of Kenner, on Burns' front lawn. Prosecutors said Garland was jealous because Burns was dating his former live-in girlfriend.
Garland served 13 years of a life sentence that was commuted to 20 years by Edwards. Garland was released from Angola in November 1988.
No one answered the door Tuesday morning at his home at 1010 Minden Ave.
Willie Hall had only moved back to Kenner two months ago after being released from a Louisiana jail where he served 3-1/2 years on Kenner drug charges, his brothers said.
"He was changing his life," Roy Hall said, adding that his brother had recently become more interested in religion and had been asking questions and experimenting with praying.
One of the last times the brothers talked, Roy Hall recalled a statement from his brother that seemed to indicate better times were ahead: "'I started talking to God. I felt something. I just can't describe it yet.'"
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