Homeless helper puzzled by shooting

Jace Radke

Monday, Jan. 22, 2001 | 11:13 a.m.

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John 3:16 Cook has been asking himself what he did to deserve having his home and the converted postal truck he uses to dispense "Soup, Soap and Hope" shot up Saturday night.

"I'm baffled," Cook said. "I don't think I have any enemies. I just go out and try to help people, but now I'm terrified."

About 11 p.m. Saturday Cook and his wife, Magickal Marissa, a metaphysicist and astrologer, heard several gunshots, one of which blew out their kitchen window.

"The police came by, and they think it was a shotgun," Cook said. "Marissa was in the kitchen at the time, and a piece of wadding hit her in the head. Thank God she wasn't hit by a pellet."

The windows also were shot out in Cook's old red truck, which he uses to haul hot coffee, sandwiches, clothes and medicine to the homeless and sick.

"I just don't know why someone would want to shoot at us," Cook said. "We're not dopers, and we don't party. I never bring homeless people home, except for a woman last week, but she had two babies and she left after we got her some help."

Cook and his wife live on Ellis Street in North Las Vegas in a neighborhood near Lake Mead Boulevard and Belmont Street. Cook uses the small house as the home base for his mission of lending a helping hand.

He moved to Las Vegas 14 years ago, after starting his mission to the homeless in the '60s in Memphis, Tenn. The ordained minister later found his way to Florida, Louisiana and North Carolina.

Since he came to Las Vegas, the city's homeless population has come to know Cook as a man who can be counted on for a meal, to pull a bothersome tooth or to stitch up cuts and wounds.

Cook has learned to stretch a dollar to help people, as well as to keep himself and his wife off the street, where they are often in danger of ending up.

"I can take $20 and feed 100 people," Cook said.

Cook has boarded up the broken windows on his truck and home, and says that he doesn't know where he'll get the money to repair the windows. The couple do their work and live on Cook's military pension, Social Security and about $50 a month that Marissa makes for writing an astrology column.

"We might need some help if we're going to get this fixed, but it won't stop me from doing what I'm doing," Cook said.