1 death during Florence: A hunter keeping watch on his dogs

Bennie Lee Sutton was 77, a big man with a bad knee and a pacemaker who previously had double-bypass heart surgery, his family said.

There were no wounds, so no autopsy was performed to establish the cause of his death, something Marian Sutton accepts as logical.

He formerly worked on the production line at a local textile plant and then did tree removal, his wife said. The couple’s son died falling out of a tree that he and his father were cutting down in 2008, said Marian Sutton, 68.

The couple first met after Bennie had already finished high school and he was a popular local athlete, she said. They became romantic years later, married in 1972 and moved into the 1,110-square-foot brick home built for them.

“He was a people person. He would mingle with the drunkard just like somebody who’s sober,” Marian Sutton said.

An avid outdoorsman with deer heads — along with the other end of one animal — mounted on the living room walls, Sutton was as likely to be outside in a storm as sitting safely indoors, his daughter said. Photos of his family, as well as former President Barack Obama’s, stand on a glass table and lean against the legs below it in the centre of the room. Trophies and programs collected during Sutton’s athletic career in the 1970s and 1980s fill a glass cabinet.

W.S. Nicholson Sr. knew Sutton since the early 1970s when he was admired on the softball diamond and basketball courts. Nicholson was working at a local tire plant and joined one of its softball teams, where he encountered Sutton as a block of a man at about 6-foot-2 and 240 pounds who commonly slammed opposing pitches over outfield fences.

The tall black man was so good that all-white teams wanted him on their side despite the informal segregation of the day, helping to bring change to a small, rural Southern town, Nicholson said.

“It was still the mindset of a lot of people that didn’t really want to mix,” Nicholson said. “But because of his talent and his character, his personality, they wanted, they needed” him.

Confident, but controlled, Sutton never argued an umpire’s call on the diamond, said Nicholson, who became Sutton’s pastor at Savannah Free Will Baptist Church in Grifton. Taking on a task, Sutton would see it through, Nicholson said. The church would raise money by selling boxed lunches of grilled chicken, Nicholson said, so Sutton would start the charcoal at 2:30 a.m. to ensure customers could start picking up their meals eight hours later.

Sutton also didn’t hide his emotions, joining in the praise during church services or keeping friends laughing.

“He was just a big man, with a big heart, big emotion,” Nicholson said.

It’s not clear if any of the friends in his hunting club will take the dogs, Marian Sutton said, but at her age she’s not able to care for such a large pack and plans to give them away.

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Follow Emery P. Dalesio on Twitter at http://twitter.com/emerydalesio . His work can be found at https://apnews.com/search/emery%20dalesio .

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For the latest on Hurricane Florence, visit https://www.apnews.com/tag/Hurricanes

Emery P. Dalesio, The Associated Press

by Canadian Press

1 death during Florence: A hunter keeping watch on his dogs

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