At a little after 1 a.m. on Friday, a Waffle House waitress in Biloxi, Miss., was shot and killed by a customer after she asked him not to smoke in the restaurant. Waitress Julie Brightwell had wandered over to the table of Johnny Mount and politely asked him to extinguish the cigarette he was smoking.

As soon as Brightwell had made her request, Mount got up, pulled his gun, and shot her in the head. Brightwell had been a waitress at the Waffle House for over eight years, according to The New York Daily News. As she was dying on the floor of the restaurant waiting for an ambulance to arrive, she calmly and cheerily asked about everyone’s Thanksgiving and holiday shopping as a crowd began to encircle her.

Customers commented later that they couldn’t believe how calm Brightwell was and how she was quietly just taking an interest in everyone’s lives.

Mount had been a Biloxi firefighter for 10 years when he suffered a traumatic brain injury while on duty in 2002. He was severely injured during a traffic accident on Christmas Eve of that year and suffered irreparable brain damage. Mount had been standing in the middle of the street when he was hit by a car and thrown. The driver of the car was not charged with a crime and it was considered by authorities to have been an accident.

Mount has been charged by Biloxi police with first degree murder and is being detained on a $2 million bond. Someone who knows Mount declared that he was a good man and not a monster like everyone is thinking. Something just seemed to snap inside, friends said. Something had gone terribly wrong in his brain and it was Brightwell’s misfortune to have triggered it.

The Biloxi police chief said he couldn’t understand why someone would have been so irrational about a cigarette. Friends who know Mount, however, know that is wasn’t really about the cigarette.