Dozens of neighbors gathered on a quiet road Wednesday night in Crete Township to grieve three people killed in a triple homicide Monday, who were members of the same family.
Jacob Lambert, 32, his mother, Stacy Forde, 54, and her husband, Patrick Forde, 55, were found dead in their home on East Norway Trail in Willow Brook Estates early Monday morning. Jenna Strouble, a St. John, Indiana, resident and the mother of Lambert’s children, was charged with the first-degree murder Tuesday.
Terry Cox, pastor of First Apostolic Church of Steger, organized the vigil with his wife, Alyssa. He opened with a quote from Psalm 34:18.
“‘The Lord is close to the brokenhearted, and saves those who are crushed in spirit,'” he said. “We have all felt that crushing over these last many days.”
Terry and Alyssa Cox were neighbors of the Forde family, living just three doors down.
“The Forde family was definitely individuals that looked out for their neighbors,” Terry Cox said. “I remember one time we got a call, they’d been working at a food pantry, and they said, ‘Pastor Cox and Alyssa, I’m sure you don’t need this, but we’ve got so much extra food. Can we bring you a box of food?'”
He realized something was wrong at about 3 a.m. Monday because of the lights and sounds of the emergency vehicles. The bodies were found by the Will County sheriff’s office after a well-being check requested by a concerned family member.
“When we looked out, and noticed where they were, we began to pray,” Terry Cox said. “That’s always a shock to your system, when someone so close to you has gone through something like this.”
The Coxes had planned for just a few attendees at Wednesday’s prayer vigil, and were overwhelmed by the number of neighbors who came out. People filled the street in front of the Forde home, and they quickly ran out of programs and electric candles to distribute.
“We were expecting maybe 12, 14,” Terry Cox said. “I think there’s close to a hundred.”
Many attendees brought bouquets of flowers. The Forde family moved to Willow Brook Estates only a few years ago, Terry Cox said, but they had quickly become well-loved.
“This family, they were lights. They were lights in this neighborhood,” he said.
Attendee Blaine Lamb-Rosenfeldt said she lived farther away, in Monee, but she knew Patrick Forde from the Lincoln Oaks Golf Course, where he worked.
“I can’t believe it,” Lamb-Rosenfeldt said. “Just golfing here and there, I would see him. I was shocked.”
Alyssa Cox led the assembled mourners in singing “Amazing Grace.”
“The sad part is coming out the front door and seeing their house, every time,” Alyssa Cox said. “That’s a terrible feeling.”
Willow Brook Estates is a peaceful and close-knit community, she said, and the sudden and shocking tragedy had hit neighbors hard.
“We have keys. Keys to each other’s houses,” she said. “I don’t think there’s a neighborhood quite as good as this one. It’s a family.”
There has been an outpouring of love and support from the community, she said.
“If they knew that they could bring the community together in this way, I know that they’d be very, very happy about that,” Alyssa Cox said. “There’s neighbors, all day, people out hugging each other, meeting new neighbors, and that wouldn’t have happened if they weren’t the type of people that they were.”
During the vigil, Terry Cox encouraged attendees to pray together with those standing next to them.
“One of the sad things about living in a world where we sometimes are scared of our neighbors, or we just don’t really take the time to get to know one another: we don’t know the light that our neighbor has,” he said. “We don’t know you well enough to know how wonderful it is that you live close by.”
elewis@chicagotribune.com
