Folks at the North Texas Airstream Community in Hillsboro remember young  Kade Johnson vividly.

You have to be 45 or older to live in what its manager calls a home base for avid travelers, but visiting children are welcome, and the Midlothian first grader was a frequent guest of his grandparents, Carl and Cynthia Johnson. 

“Everyone in the park knew him,” said Marya Garren, who runs the gated enclave 50 miles south of Fort Worth. “He would ride his bike around the cul-de-sac.”

Kade was very much a part of the community. He loved Carl and Cindy and he loved camping with them.”

He was camping with his grandparents in East Texas on Nov. 14 when he was murdered along with his grandfather, his mother and his mother’s fiancé and his two adult sons. Only his mother survived the massacre.

“Right now you try to push all that away,” Cynthia Johnson said. “I’d really rather not talk about it.” But like a proud grandmother, she went on warmly about her grandson.

“He was a delight,” she said, describing the blond boy, who attended LaRue Miller Elementary in Midlothian, slowly overcoming child shyness he shared with his mom. “He was coming out of it earlier than his mother did.”

For example, Cynthia  pointed to a recent show of bravery of Kade crossing the street to meet a group of unknown boys to play with them.

“We were all amazed at that courage, to go over an introduce himself,” said his grandmother. 

Thomas Kamp, the man his mother and Kade lived with, wasn’t the boy’s biological father, but he made sure Kade participated in the extended tribe Hannah and Thomas had formed in the Midlothian, Texas,  community where they lived.

He was so much a part of the group that Kamp’s brother, Todd Kamp, even knew Kade’s favorite color: camoflage. 

“Tom treated him just like his own,” said the Kamps’ aunt, Beverly Woodruff.  “He would take him to school.”

Sometimes Kade had to take the bus. Sadly, it no longer stops at his home.