BY JOEL REESE
Daily Herald Staff Writer

About 12 hours before Tom Mennes was murdered at Brown's Chicken & Pasta, his best friend tried to convince Mennes not to go to work that night.

"I said, 'Come on, let's go hunting. Call in sick,'" recalled Mennes' pal, Dirk Messner.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF MENNES FAMILY Tom Mennes, at right, and twin Jerry show off their eighth-grade diplomas. Tom holds his nephew, Jerome, as new father Jerry looks on.

Mennes said no: The Brown's owners would need him because of the big Palatine vs. Fremd basketball game, he said.

"Tom's exact words were, 'I can't. There's something big going on at the school, so they're going to be shorthanded. I've got to go to work,'" Messner said.

Mennes' straightforward dedication to his job was no surprise to his friends and family.

"Tom was a simple guy. You could probably fit all of his belongings in the trunk of a car," his brother Larry said in his eulogy.

Those possessions included a crucifix and prayer cards from other relatives' funerals.

"He was a good, peaceful person," Larry said from his home in Houston.

The quirky Mennes often could be seen tooling around Palatine on a clunky black bike, which seemed to fit his eccentric personality.

"He wasn't a complicated person," said Linda Conley, one of Mennes' sisters-in-law. "Tom worked and he rode his bike. He wasn't destined to be somebody big or important, but he was loved. If he had lived, he might have a family. Who knows what he could have done, if he'd lived?"

Mennes, who died at 32, was born in Palatine and never left. He spent his time hanging out with friends, listening to music and bow hunting.

Mennes liked aspects of hunt-ing - the thrill of the hunt, the freedom of being outdoors - but he couldn't kill. In years of hunting, he never did kill or wound an animal, his brother said.

"One time, a buck jumped out in front of him about 20 yards away and froze," Larry said at Tom's funeral. "Tom drew his arrow and at the last moment shot above the buck. Tom couldn't shoot a rabbit. He couldn't hurt anything."

Mennes grew up with his twin Jerry and four other brothers, but his childhood wasn't exactly idyllic: His mother died of cancer when he was 14, exactly 18 years to the day before Tom died. His older brother, John, died of a heart attack in 1988.

Death continued to haunt the Mennes family after Brown's: His father, Emil, a WWII veteran, was violently murdered in his Palatine condominium in 1999.

The young Mennes wasn't much for school, but Jerry, a stronger math student, would come to the rescue. At Palatine's Walter R. Sundling Junior High School, the two concocted an elaborate plan in which they would wear the same clothes and even switch lockers. Then, they would attend each other's math classes.

"His math was really bad, and mine was really good," Jerry explained.

Tom and Jerry were both pitchers in Little League: Tom's best pitch was a knuckleball; Jerry's a sidearm curve. Their connection went beyond the pitcher's mound and multiplication, though.

"They had that weird twin thing going," said childhood friend Jody Miller of Chicago. "One would know something was happening while it was happening. Jerry broke his arm and Tom knew about it immediately. He said, 'Wait, something's wrong. I feel something in my arm. I've gotta find my brother.'"

Mennes went to Fremd High School, but he didn't graduate. Instead, he took various jobs and hung out with friends. He often would go fishing, riding his bike to a quarry off Hicks Road or to Lake Michigan, Messner said.

Mennes always seemed to be on his rickety black bike. He never drove after he went for a teenage joyride in Larry's car and crashed it into a house.

"It's kind of funny now, but it wasn't too funny then," said Gerri Haag, whose husband, Paul, was with Tom when they crashed.

The idiosyncratic Mennes loved bands like Led Zeppelin and Rush and didn't care much for social conventions.

"He used to leave messages on our answering machine saying, 'Where are you? Bye,'" recalled brother Bob. "Or he'd say, 'This is Tom,' wait a few seconds, then hang up. He was a character."

"He was quiet - I wouldn't say he was shy," re-called childhood friend Miller. "He'd listen and absorb information just so he could get to know people before he'd decide whether he wanted to get to know them better."

Casey Sander, a former co-worker at Brown's Chicken & Pasta, called Mennes "the nicest guy in the world."

"He and I had this connection because we both rode bikes," said Sander, who was 17 at the time of the murders. "At night, he would basically walk me to my bike to make sure I was OK. Other times, he'd go get my bike and prop it up right next to the door."

Like Marcus Nellsen, another victim in the Brown's killings, Mennes ended up at Brown's after a previous place of work closed.

One day, Mennes went to his job as a dishwasher at Perkins Restaurant in Palatine, then just turned around and went back home.

Turns out the restaurant had closed and was shuttered. But rather than complain about his fate, Mennes simply found another job.

After Perkins, Mennes worked for a roofing company, two different chicken restaurants and bagged groceries at the Palatine Dominick's, where he made an impression with his desire to help shoppers.

At Mennes' funeral, the Rev. Walter E. Huppenbauer told a story about a woman on crutches who shopped at the Dominick's.

"'Sometimes I'd have my groceries ready to go to the car and he'd be across the store,'" Huppenbauer quoted the woman as saying. "'He'd see me, get a big smile and run over to help me.'"

Mennes left Dominick's to take the job as a breader at Brown's just a few weeks before he was killed.

It was a job he seemed to feel good about - good enough to want to show it off to his family.

"I went to Brown's one time and he introduced me to the Ehlenfeldts - it was really great," Bob said, referring to Brown's owners Richard and Lynn Ehlenfeldt. "He was really proud of that job."

Mennes and Richard Ehlenfeldt were found in a walk-in cooler, away from the other five workers who were killed.

The night Tom was murdered, Jerry awoke with a start about 1 a.m.

"At the moment, I didn't think it was anything," Jerry said. "But now with time, maybe he visited us and was trying to tell us something was going on."