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Every visit began the same way. No warning, no plan — just a phone call.

"Are you at home?" John Wesley Allen would ask his older sister, Delores Fowler, and within the hour he'd be waiting for her at the MetroLink station or the bus stop nearby. It was a routine the 78-year-old had kept for years. On Monday night, it put him in the path of a knife-wielding teenager in a clown costume — and it cost him his life.

"A Random Attack"

Allen was found dead Monday night at an intersection in East St. Louis that his family says sits near the bus stop where he'd wait for his sister to pick him up. Illinois State Police described the killing as "a random attack by a suspect wearing a clown outfit."

A 15-year-old boy has since been charged in connection with Allen's death. Police said there are no known previous connections between the victim and the suspect — no dispute, no history, nothing that explains why Allen was targeted at all.

East St. Louis police have referred all inquiries about the case to Illinois State Police, which is now leading the investigation. A spokesperson for state authorities declined to comment Friday. It remains unclear whether the teenage suspect has retained or been assigned legal counsel.

A Retired Bus Driver Who "Just Loved People"

To his family, Allen wasn't just a man waiting at a bus stop — he was a fixture of St. Louis public transit long before he became one of its passengers.

Allen drove a bus for Metro Transit in St. Louis from 1977 until his retirement in 1994, according to the agency and his family. He spent the years after his wife's 2019 death living alone in a retirement community, but loved ones say he refused to let that slow him down.

"He was a very friendly person. He would talk to anybody. He just loved people," Fowler, 82, told NBC News.

That same openness worried the people closest to him.

"We were always concerned about him coming over without calling, but he just enjoyed being with his sister," said Allen's niece, Tania Stanford, 49. "He was a joyful person and he was loved. He was a friendly guy who would do anything. He'd give you the shirt off his back if he could."

Learning the News from a Stranger's Screen

Perhaps the cruelest detail in Allen's death is how his family first heard about it — not from police, not from a hospital, but from a local news broadcast that got his name only half right.

Fowler said friends began calling, asking if the man being reported on television was her brother. She dismissed it at first.

"Friends were asking me, 'Is this John that we've been seeing (on local TV news), that somebody killed him?'" she recalled. "That's when I turned the TV on and they said it was a 'Wesley Allen,' and I said to myself, 'Well, that's not him. His name is John Wesley Allen.'"

It was him.

A Family Seeking Accountability

For Fowler, the randomness of her brother's death is precisely what makes it unbearable. There was no motive, no warning, no history between Allen and the teenager now charged in his killing — just an ordinary bus stop, on an ordinary evening, on a route Allen had walked countless times before.

"He took a person's life for no reason," Fowler said. She wants the case handled with the full weight the law allows. "We want him tried as an adult."

As the investigation continues, Allen's family is left holding the same routine that once brought them comfort — the unannounced calls, the rides to the bus stop, the sister who was always home when he needed her — now recast as the final thread connecting them to the day he died.