Nathan Ackison and his wife, Rashonna, were driving home in Philadelphia early Tuesday afternoon when they heard the scraping sound of the car's tailpipe dragging on the street.
A local garage owner, who happened to be in the area, saw the pipe and told Nathan to follow him to his garage on Baltimore Avenue, in the southwest part of town.
It's considered a rough part of Philadelphia. When he arrived, Ackison, a former Fayette County, West Virginia, resident and Marshall University graduate, left his pregnant wife in the car and went around to the rear of the car to see what could be done about the tailpipe.
A few minutes later, Ronald Stanley, 56, approached the car and peered in at Rashonna before continuing back toward Nathan.
Nathan's mother, Wendy Swiger of Charleston, said, "They thought he was just another street person looking to get money."
He wasn't.
Stanley, believed to have been under the influence of a drug, was on a rampage and had stabbed two other men before approaching the Ackisons.
Stanley grabbed Nathan, spun him around, and stabbed him in the chest.
"It happened so fast," Swiger said. "I doubt he felt much, really, just a punch in the middle of the chest."
Bleeding heavily, the 30-year-old stumbled out into the middle of the street and shouted out the shahada, a mantra and prayer many Muslims say repeatedly as a testament to their faith.
It is also often recited before death.
"They said it could he heard all the way down the street," Swiger said. "It was all over the neighborhood."
He collapsed in the street, while a crowd gathered and Stanley slipped away.
In Charleston, around the time the Ackisons stopped at the garage, Nathan's mother, Wendy Swiger said she felt ill.
"I was on the couch, flipping through pictures on my phone and found an old one, 10 years old probably, of Nathan coming home."
She didn't have a lot of pictures of her son on her phone. He'd been in Philadelphia for five years and didn't come back to West Virginia much.
Swiger acknowledged that there'd been some friction between them over the years, but nothing related to any particular thing.
"He lived in Philadelphia," she said. "We didn't get up to visit, but we saw him whenever they blew through town."
Swiger described her son as having a strong personality, said he was talented and ambitious, but also a joker, who knew how to annoy her. He had his problems. He could be confrontational, argumentative, and he had sometimes drank too much before he converted to Islam, but he was a good man with a big heart, and she missed him.
She wasn't sure how long it had been since they had been in contact, but it had been a while. So, she sent him the picture on her phone.
Rashonna texted back, telling her Nathan had just been stabbed. An hour later, Swiger's son was dead.
There was nothing anyone could have done.
Nathan was born in Virginia, but his parents moved to Fayetteville when he was 10. He had a normal childhood, Swiger said. He loved music, his friends, and making people laugh.
He didn't always get along with his parents, and lived with his grandfather for a while.
Nathan played in the high school band, and was a good student. He earned a Promise Scholarship and studied business at Marshall University, where he earned a degree, but he was restless and prone to roaming, his mother said.
"He'd sleep in his car," Swiger said. "It drove us crazy, but he'd get in his car and go to Morgantown or Huntington to hang out with his college friends. He'd just drive."
While living in Huntington, he began studying Islam, and then converted to the faith at age 25.
Swiger, a born-again Christian, said her son liked the very clear-cut nature of the religion.
"He saw it as very black and white," she said. "There was a clear sense of right and wrong in the religion."
Nathan embraced his new faith passionately. He grew a beard, covered his head, and even adopted Middle Eastern dress, which sometimes encouraged stares and comments.
Swiger, a portrait artist, remembered once, just outside her studio in Fayetteville, she heard a crash and a shout.
On the street, a man with a bicycle was sitting in the street, blood running down his face.
"He'd hit his head, and was bleeding," Swiger said. "I went out to help."
The cyclist, she said, had spotted Nathan in a robe walking down the street. The cyclist turned his head and yelled, "Hey man, nice dress," when a car pulled up at the end of the block.
He crashed into the side of the vehicle and flipped his bike.
Nathan left West Virginia for good four years ago. He moved to Philadelphia, where he found work, became part of the local Muslim community and met his wife.
After Swiger got off the phone with Rashonna, she called her daughter, Laurel Caroline, in Florida to tell her about her brother. Caroline caught a flight to Charleston the next morning, and then the two of them drove from Charleston to Philadelphia.
"It was eight hours in the car," Swiger said. "We talked and cried about Nathan the entire time."
They met Nathan's wife and then went to the junkyard to clean out her son's car.
"He was so messy," she said.
The car reeked of perfumed oils. Nathan sold the oils, as a side business, using a local Muslim wholesaler, but Swiger said her son was kind of a slob. A few of the bottles weren't tightly secured and the oils had seeped out into mail and random trash in the backseat.
"But it wasn't just about selling the oils," Swiger said. "He really liked the smell."
She's not sure why she did it, but she took a couple of bottles of oil, and then Swiger and her daughter went to the street where Nathan had been murdered.
"It was something I felt like I needed to do," she said.
They talked to an old man standing by a beat up door and asked him if he knew where he son had died.
The man told her, stricken, "Yeah, I know something about that."
Then he and another man from the neighborhood blocked traffic while Swiger and her daughter poured oil on the spot where Nathan breathed his last breath and made peace with God.
Swiger and her daughter attended the funeral, along with Nathan's father and his wife. Services were held at the local mosque, where the men sat in the main room, while the women watched the proceedings on a big-screen television in another room.
Gender separation in a mosque is common practice.
Afterwards, Nathan's body was taken in a simple pine box to a Muslim cemetery a few blocks away.
"They opened the box up to let us see him," she said. "He was wrapped in a shroud."
Swiger explained that Muslims don't embalm or cosmetically adjust the body for a viewing, but wash the body in preparation for internment in a grave.
Nathan's eyes were slightly open; his mouth slightly ajar.
"But he was gone," she said. "It was just a shell."
The family and the Muslim community laid Nathan's body to rest. Swiger and her daughter took a couple of handfuls of the dirt, put them in a plastic bag, and brought them back to Charleston.
She's not entirely sure what she's going to do with them - maybe put some of it in the empty perfume bottles and give them to people who knew her son.
Swiger's grief is terrible and leaves her disoriented at times. She's talking a lot to her daughter and daughter-in-law, and that helps.
According to news reports in Philadelphia, Ronald Stanley was apprehended not long after the killing and charged with murder, criminal homicide, aggravated and simple assault and other related offenses.
As a mother who lost her son, Swiger said she could be angry at Stanley for what he did. She could want him dead, but she doesn't.
"He wasn't there," Swiger said. "He was as high as a kite, and out of his mind. He had no idea. He was a boulder tumbling down a hill."
Her son just happened to be in the way.
That doesn't free him of the responsibility for his actions, but Swiger said hate served no purpose. She doesn't have the energy for it. Rashonna, her son's wife, is four months pregnant and looking to deliver what would have been the couple's first child in August.
"I worry about them," she said.
Rashonna, in many ways, is a very traditional Muslim woman. She hasn't worked outside of the home, and doesn't really have any skills.
To help, a gofundme account has been set up, www.gofundme.com/WidowedSister, to raise money for Nathan's widow. A goal of $5,000 was set. So far, the account has raised more than $7,000.
Wednesday afternoon, Rashonna was at the hospital getting an ultrasound, hoping to learn the sex of her child.
Swiger later learned, "It's a boy!"
Reach Bill Lynch at lynch@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-5195, follow @LostHwys on Twitter or visit Bill's blog: blogs.wvgazettemail.com/onemonth