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Marine Veteran, 60, Gunned Down For $8

CHICAGO (CBS) -- Police are looking for the killer of a Chicago Marine Corps veteran who was murdered on the way to his dialysis treatment.

Friends remember Robert Sharpe, as a person who radiated kindness.

"That man was just one of a kind," friend Pete Anderson tells CBS 2's Suzanne Le Mignot.

Robert Sharpe As Young Marine
Robert Sharpe as a Marine. (picture provided to CBS)

Anderson says he often drove the fellow veteran to the El, when Sharpe went to dialysis.

Sharpe, 60, was heading for treatment around 5 a.m. Saturday. He was at a bus stop at Kedzie and Franklin when, police say, a man wearing a half-mask demanded Sharpe's wallet and showed him a chrome-plated revolver.

The former Marine refused. There was a struggle, and the thief shot Sharpe and fled with the bag the 60 year-old always carried on his shoulder.

The armed robber got away with $8 and credit cards, the mortally wounded Sharpe reportedly told police.

"It's a tragedy. The young man who did that, he took something -- a treasure from us, you know, forever. It was just useless," Anderson says.

Another friend of Sharpe, Filomeno Barco, says: "That's the kind of world we live in now. It's just so much craziness and meanness."

Sharpe was fatally shot about a block from his apartment building in West Humboldt Park. Building manager Emily Diebold says Sharpe was a true gentleman—always wearing a suit and tie and regularly visiting his mother on Fridays.

She says Sharpe was a corporal when he left the Marines in 1990.

 

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