Shooting leaves family at a loss
Handyman slain by officer after allegedly stealing one can of beer
GALVESTON—Earlier this year, Stephanie Mosley put her brother on a bus in northern California bound for New Orleans.
Toby Dean Cummins hoped to find work in the Crescent City, but he stopped instead in Houston, where he met someone who hired him to build desks.
The freewheeling 55-year-old handyman with the disarming smile kept in touch with Mosley and another sister, Katherine Augustine, via text messages. He told Augustine he was working in high-income neighborhoods and had a good relationship with his boss.
“He also told me he was very happy, was enjoying it there and had met some very nice people,” said Augustine, 60, of Reno, Nev. “He said he met a beautiful red-headed, blue-eyed gal.”
Augustine never heard from her brother again.
A Friendswood police officer fatally shot Cummins on Tuesday after he allegedly stole a can of beer from a convenience store. The city’s police chief said Cummins had displayed box cutters with an extended blade to the officer, who feared for his life.
Police Chief Robert Wie-
ners had not identified the officer as of Friday, but the officer remained on administrative leave pending the outcome of investigations into the shooting death.
Wieners said police suspected Cummins was a transient — a description that distressed his ex-wife, Sue, 53, of Dallas.
Said Sue Cummins: “He was a person. He was a father, a son, a brother, an uncle, and he was shot down for no reason over a beer.”
At about 3 p.m. Tuesday, Cummins walked into the convenience store of a Shell station on the southeast corner of FM 2351 and South Friendswood Drive, about 25 miles southeast of downtown Houston. He asked the clerk to allow him to take a beer and pay for it the next day. When the clerk refused, Cummins said, “I have to have a beer or I’ll have to take it from you,” station owner Mehran “Ron” Jadidi told the Chronicle.
The clerk said he warned Cummins that if he took the beer, he would call police.
“You do what you have to do,” Cummins responded before walking out, beer in hand, according to Jadidi.
‘Went numb’
Police confronted Cummins four blocks from the service station on the sidewalk in front of a law firm. Bystanders in nearby office buildings reported hearing three gunshots. Witnesses later saw officers with drawn guns and Cummins’ crumpled body in a pool of blood on the sidewalk.
The following day, Mosley, 58, of Campbell, Calif., received a call from Cummins’ ex-wife.
“Is Toby still in California?” Sue Cummins asked.
When Mosely replied that he was in Texas, Sue Cummins gasped, “He’s been shot and killed,” Mosley recalled.
“I went numb right then,” Mosley added. “I didn’t know what to do.”
The medical examiner at the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences had phoned one of Toby Cummins’ three sons, Jaimie, 29, in Lewisville, about 25 miles north of Dallas. Jaimie Cummins put his mother on a three-way call with the medical examiner’s office.
“It just crushed mewhen they called me,” Sue Cummins said. “I thought, this can’t be true. Who shoots someone over a beer?”
Made friends easily
Cummins’ sisters said he might have been obstinate with police but found it difficult to believe that he would have threatened an officer with a weapon.
“He’s not the type that’s going to charge an officer with a knife,” Mosely said. “Why didn’t they take him? He’s only 5-foot-7 and about 160 pounds.”
Toby Cummins spent the early years of his life in Campbell, Calif,, before his family moved to nearby San Jose. He played football and baseball at Santa Teresa High School.
Cummins made friends wherever he went, his sisters said.
“Toby had a shine about him that is hard to describe,” Augustine said. “He had a smile that just lit up, and there wasn’t anybody that didn’t like him.”
She said that smile captured her heart at the age of 14 as he cleaned the window on her family’s car at a service station.
“He was smiling through the window,” she recalled. “That’s what I fell in love with — his smile and his personality.”
They married in 1983, when she was 21. The marriage last about six years before they drifted apart. They had two sons, Jaimie and Jessie, 32, of Rockland, Calif. His son Tony, 18, of Groveland, Calif., was the product of another relationship.
At some point, Toby Cummins developed a drinking problem that led to a few minor skirmishes with the law, family members said. Augustine maintained her brother eventually got control of the problem by sticking to beer.
“In his younger years he was wild — some might call crazy,” Augustine said. “Later in his adult life, he became at peace with who he was.”
One last night
After his marriage dissolved, Cummins left a job he held for 13 years at a sheet metal company and began a career as a handyman who could take on almost any job. He would set out across the country and work odd jobs so he could meet people, his sisters said.
“He would go from place to place, and because of the personality he had, people would offer him jobs,” Augustine said.
On Tuesday, Mosely, who had put her brother on that New Orleans-bound bus weeks earlier, received a call from Toby. He had borrowed a phone from a woman he’d befriended at a feed store in the Friendswood area. He was ready to come back. She agreed to send her brother a bus ticket so he could return from his latest ramble.
Said Augustine, “All he had to do was get through one more night, and he would have been on his way home.”