Man Slain for a Beer Is Family’s 4th Gun Victim : Crime: Killer ‘grabbed the beer and . . . walked away like it was nothing,’ witnesses to the Florence-area shooting say. Deputies report no suspects.

The blue plastic shopping cart David Stewart wheeled around his Florence-area neighborhood, collecting cans and bottles to recycle for cash, still sat on Mary Avenue on Sunday afternoon.

Gone, however, were the man who pushed the cart early every morning--and the can of beer that authorities say led to his murder.

He was shot to death about 7 a.m. Sunday in front of a house on Mary Avenue, sheriff’s deputies said, after an unidentified gunman apparently demanded that Stewart hand over the can of beer he had just bought at a neighborhood liquor store not far from where he lived with his parents.

Now, says his mother, Catherine, David Stewart’s picture will join those of two brothers and a sister, also killed by guns, in a memorial collage that hangs on the wall of the family’s apartment, near where Stewart was slain.

When Stewart, 42, refused to give up the beer, his assailant shot him several times, witnesses told sheriff’s deputies.

Then the gunman “grabbed the beer and left. . . . He walked away like it was nothing,” said one eyewitness, a San Pedro woman who was visiting her mother, who lives nearby.

As of Sunday night, Sheriff’s Deputy Brian Jones said, there were no suspects. The gunman “was seen drinking the beer and calmly walking away,” Jones said.

Relatives and friends said Stewart left home about 5 a.m. every day on a regular scavenging route that usually ended three hours later, after he cashed in his recyclables and bought himself a six-pack of beer and some cigarettes to share with his family.

So when his parents heard a knock on the door at 8 a.m. Sunday, they thought it was their son, returning to the apartment. Instead, it was sheriff’s deputies, with news of his death.

“He was my son. He was my world. He was all a mother wanted in a son,” his mother said Sunday. She rested under a blanket on a living-room couch after returning from the hospital where she was taken briefly after being told she had lost her fourth child to violence. “It looks like it’s just going to kill me.”

Stewart’s cousin, Flora Scott, described him as “a nice person who had respect for his fellow man, but was not the type who would let you take his belongings.” It is “so degrading,” she said, “to kill a man for a can of beer--that’s horrible.”

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Stewart was on government disability since being shot in the back during a fight in the 1970s, his family said. With his disability check and money from his scavenging route, he helped with rent and expenses at the apartment he shared with his parents and his surviving brother and sister.

One neighbor recalled seeing him on his usual route. “He didn’t bother anybody. He’d just give you a friendly ‘hi’ and go on his way,” said Bonnie Beavers.

And so when she learned that Stewart had been killed--and how--Beavers said, “I just couldn’t believe it.”

From where they sit on the steps of a nearby apartment building, Jerry Bailey and his friends would see Stewart every day on his way home from the market where he recycled his wares.

“He was just one of the regular fellows, like us,” said Bailey, 34. “He was a nice person; you can’t put it any more bluntly than that.”