“That was the most I’d ever seen her cry,” Clark says. “It just brought it home.”

Jenkins was a regular at the store.

“He would always come into the store and order a sandwich. Baby ham, brie, avocado on white bread,” Katie remembers. “We’d talk about his cats...he was always such a friendly guy. It’s just shocking.”

When the Clarks heard that Jenkins was one of the approximately 5,000 victims of the terrorist attacks, they put Sadie on the leash and walked to Star Market to buy flowers to place on Jenkins’ doorstep. In her own quiet sort of memorial, Katie went back to the Oxford Spa and made him a sandwich.

The next day, Katie says she saw Jenkins’ friends bring a truck down her street to clear his belongings out of his house.

It’s an image, she says, that will always stay with her.

“They were moving all the stuff out and I just couldn’t stay on the street. I had to go,” Katie remembers. She shakes her head and pulls nervously at her straight blonde hair as she speaks. “The whole thing’s just too sad.”

For about a week, members of the neighborhood continued to place flowers at the door and even held a silent vigil for their friend last Tuesday evening. A handful of Crescent Street residents took the train to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Boston to attend Jenkins’ memorial service on Monday, where a crowd of 400 spilled into the hall. Besides his neighbors, Jenkins leaves behind his mother, Florence Deatherage of Kentucky, and two brothers, James Jenkins of Ohio and Jeff Jenkins of Kentucky.

A group of children living on the street taped a sign reading, “John, we’ll never forget you,” on their neighbor’s front door.

Mary Jo Clark traveled into Boston again last night to attend a vigil for peace. Jenkins’ death has, she says, helped solidify her view of an appropriate governmental response.

“For me, I just don’t want anybody else’s neighbor to die. I don’t want us to go indiscriminately bomb,” she says, her voice growing stronger and more emphatic. “This sort of makes it personal.”

BF: Sudden Regrets

Katie says that she and her family are also struggling with a sense of regret that they did not know Jenkins better.

For years, Mary Jo Clark says, she eyed an old poster for My Favorite Wife with Cary Grant on Jenkins’ wall, visible through his front window. As a fellow old movie buff, she says she was intrigued.