Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, February 25, 1994                   TAG: 9402250224
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: A1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MARA LEE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

VICTIM NEVER THOUGHT 'NICE MAN' WOULD ROB HIM

But before lunch time, police in two states suspected Christiansburg resident and paroled murderer Billy Joe Hampton of rape, two carjackings and assaults on three elderly people - all within 17 hours.

Thursday morning, police said, Hampton went to see Buford McCoy, 81, owner and sole employee of McCoy Garage in western Montgomery County. Hampton had visited the small cinder-block garage several times since his release from prison in 1992.

"I knew the boy," McCoy, who's worked in the garage for 55 years, said Thursday. "He'd been there lots of times. I liked him, seemed like a nice man."

McCoy no longer repairs cars; he only sells tires, gas and oil in the garage across McCoy Road from his house. He said he asked his customer, " `You want new tires or retreads?'

" `Well, I'd like the prices on both,' " the man replied, and chose two new tires. He left the garage, saying he'd be back with the car that needed them.

An hour and a half later, the man returned and asked for four tires. McCoy began to take apart the huge pile of tires out front to find two more. As he bent over, the man hit him on the head with a pipe.

McCoy blacked out for a moment, and when he came to he thought, "Well, I've had a heart attack." Even as he saw the man take his wallet, "it still didn't register."

McCoy, who was carrying between $400 and $500, said at first he thought he wouldn't press charges. "You have to go to court and everything," he explained.

But when he stood up, he said, "I started getting dizzy and the blood started pouring out."

He thought to call for an ambulance but remembered the man had ripped the phone cord out of the wall. So he walked up the ridge overlooking McCoy Road. "I thought I'd see somebody and wave to 'em. Nobody was out."

A neighbor finally saw McCoy and took him to Montgomery Regional Hospital, where he had nine stitches, he said proudly.

Wearing a white bandage he called a turban, he said, "I feel pretty good. It never has hurt too awful bad." He showed off his paper gown from the hospital and laughed.

After he was released from the hospital, a half-dozen relatives and neighbors gathered around McCoy's large white wooden house with a tin roof, once his grandfather's, that he's lived in "81 years, two months and seven days."

"This man here would give the shirt off his back to anybody," neighbor Diana Albert said with a shaky voice and a tear on her face.

Neighbors continued to arrive as the community heard of McCoy's troubles.

"You hear what happened to Buford McCoy?" a neighbor, Douglas Bryant, asked, even before McCoy had returned from the hospital. "He just trusts everybody. He probably just trusted the wrong one today.

"If you ain't got the money to buy something, he'll give it to you on credit, or just give it to you," Bryant said.

He knew McCoy carried lots of cash - and was generous with it. "He'd rather give you $50 than see you do without."