It was 1 p.m. on Friday when Joe Gibson, an employee at the Expressway Market and Deli, walked by the tall, bespectacled man who always sat in the same seat in this convenience store in southeast Bend.

Wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt, he was someone Gibson and other employees looked forward to seeing every day for years.

Glenn Bennett was eating his second chicken strip. That was his regular order, chicken strips with chocolate milk. Like every Friday, Bennett told him to have a great weekend, that he’d see him Monday, same time as always.

“He didn’t come in Monday,” Gibson said.

The 84-year-old Bennett was one of the two people killed when a 20-year-old gunman with an AR-15-style rifle opened fire on the east-side Bend Safeway on Sunday, spraying at least 100 bullets at innocent people shopping for groceries. Bennett was shot near the store’s entrance before the shooter was confronted by an employee near the back of the store. The shooter killed Donald Surrett Jr. before turning the gun on himself.

That night, Gibson watched in horror as the news unfolded. He knew Bennett often shopped at the Safeway on Sunday evenings. The police said three people were dead.

There are thousands of people in Bend, Gibson thought to himself. But what if it was somebody he knew?

“It turned out that it was someone I knew well,” Gibson said.

At work Monday, a store manager told Gibson and the Expressway employees what happened. He walked out behind the market, where co-workers were crying. Eventually, he wept, too.

“It’s just devastating, the loss,” Gibson said in a low, gravelly voice, sitting just a few feet from the green chair at the market that the employees knew as Bennett’s chair.

“It was something I looked forward to every day, seeing him,” he said. “He always had well wishes for me. He always knew every day that I was getting off at 1 p.m. and would say, Go home. Get some rest. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

All week, people have come to the market and told employees that they’re sorry for their loss. One woman, who knew Bennett frequented the market, arrived on Monday, saying in a panicked voice that she saw Bennett enter the Safeway but didn’t see him come out. The staff told her Bennett was gone. She burst into tears.

Bennett never told the market staff much about himself, but he was always there, sometimes trudging through the snow and ice. A GoFundMe page set up by the family says he was a medic in the Korean War whose family moved to Bend in 1974. Bennett lived in a home nearby and supported his sister, a widow on a fixed income.

The market employees have only just begun to grieve. Bennett was more than a customer. He was their friend who gave them memories.

There he was, encouraging them to restock his favorite food and drink, which they always did.

There he was, messing up their names, sometimes as a joke and sometimes because he genuinely couldn’t remember.

There he was, flipping up his goofy sunglasses to reveal clear lenses underneath.

There he was, sitting in that same chair for hours at a time, watching customers walk by, as if he had all the time in the world and nowhere else to be but there, with them.

“I don’t think he had a lot of people to talk to, so that was us,” said Amanda Gibson, a store clerk.

This week, the staff donated $1,000 for funeral expenses and mortgage payments through a GoFundMe page for Bennett’s family that has raised more than $45,000 in total as of Wednesday evening. The donation reads: “Glenn’s Expressway Family.”

“I cried for the past two days,” said 17-year-old Jaymin Hale, who bonded with Bennett during chats at the store. “I saw him more than my friends … Every morning, right around 7 a.m., I’d think, Oh, Glenn’s going to come in today. I better get some chicken strips ready. He meant so much to me.”

That Safeway was another place where Bennett had developed a family over the years, said Debbie Clem, a 60-year-old Bend resident who worked at the store for 25 years. Bennett, often wearing a pink tie-dye shirt, would come into the store every week and buy cereal, multiple cantaloupes and heaping stacks of bacon, which he’d bring home to his sister. At the checkout, he’d pull exact change out of a wallet he kept together with rubber bands.

He would bring Clem coffee and Christmas ornaments around the holidays. He would buy bags from her for local food drives, and she’d announce over the intercom: “Glenn Bennett helped stamp out hunger today. He purchased four food bags for our community.”

One day, Clem told Bennett about the Raggedy Ann & Andy dolls that her family could never afford for her growing up and how she’d always wanted one. He walked away, bought the dolls, came back and gave them to her. It’s a memory she clings to now that he’s gone.

“He liked to make people smile,” she said. “He liked to make people happy.”

In the days since the shooting, it has been mostly quiet around the Expressway. Maddie Baker, a 15-year-old employee, is trying to grapple with what happened. She has been homeschooled specifically because of her family’s concerns of school shootings.

But next fall, she starts class on-campus at Central Oregon Community College. The latest shooting, and that it happened to someone she’d see every day, makes her anxious to start class.

“Nobody deserved that,” she said, “especially not Glenn.”

In the front of the convenience store, above the bustling traffic speeding along Reed Market Road and through the nearby roundabout, is a large white sign with black letters. It has a message everyone already knows.

“We will miss you Glenn.”