They came holding purple balloons in the thick evening heat, dozens of them, all to honor the man who once cruised their streets by wheelchair, and who most everyone in this tight-knit city knew by name.

Jackie Davis.

In a night of both strength and sorrow, the sky in Pascagoula filled with balloons of his favorite color, and old friends and family stood together at the same intersection where a debris truck turned right into Davis’s wheelchair and killed him three days ago.

The crowd grew silent, in prayer. Then, their voices rising, they sang: “When I die, Hallelujah, by and by…

“I’ll fly away.”

It was the latest show of support in what has been a wrenching few days in Pascagoula, where over and over, people said the same thing: Everyone loved Jackie Davis.

He was a lifelong resident most in the city have at least one story about, a man known for his charm, humor and cheerful spirit despite his paralysis.

“He was the joy of this family,” Renee Nettles, his sister, said Friday afternoon from Davis’s living room, where family had gathered around his framed photo. “Everybody knew Jackie.”

Days after he died on his way home, his family said they have endless memories.

He sent them text messages of Bible scriptures. He was the third youngest of 14 children, and acted as the family doctor, the family lawyer, the family politician. He had no children, so he loved his nieces and nephews with all his heart. He had your back, they said. If he only had $5, he would give you $4.99.

He was beloved all over the city, and often seen riding down the sidewalks in his motorized wheelchair. He went to the courthouse and listened to cases, to City Council meetings so he could bring back the news, to football and basketball games, where his family said he ran his wheelchair up and down the sidelines, to cheer for the kids. They said he never missed a class reunion.

Davis, 61, knew judges and lawyers and local politicians. He stuck signs in his yard – and his neighbors’ – when someone he liked ran for office. And every time he endorsed someone, his family said, they won.

He decorated his yard for every holiday, and he was planning a Fourth of July celebration, his nieces and sisters said. He took candy to neighbors. He checked on his elders.

Now, people still come to his yard to deliver food to his family, or to sit, and remember.

Those people filled the hospital where he died on Wednesday, his sisters and nieces said.

“He left a mark on our hearts,” said his niece, Angela Colley. “It hurts.”

His family nearly lost him 14 years ago, when he was shot six times and paralyzed, they said. The suspect in that shooting was later sentenced in another case to life in prison.

And Davis spent the rest of his days in a wheelchair.

Still, “he did not let that wheelchair define him,” another niece, Lisa Knowles, said. He danced. He went swimming in a pool. He even had a drivers license, and he drove by pulling himself into his Jaguar or GMC with one arm, then using a hand to lift his leg when he needed to switch from gas to brake. Police paid him no mind, his family said. That was just Jackie.

His family said they feel no anger. There is no animosity, they said, because they believe the death was an accident. They know the driver of that truck is hurting, and they said they are praying for him, too.

But Davis’s death is almost unbelievable, they said. They have cried, remembered a good memory, smiled and cried again.

They would like people to remember Davis’s kind heart, they said.

“You see that picture right there?” Colley said, pointing across the living room, toward the frame of her uncle in his wheelchair, dressed in a gray suit and bright white sneakers, smiling big, same as always.

“That,” she said, “is Jackie.”