Weequahic anti-violence activist tired of watching kids die
The teacher keeps a notebook at home to memorialize the names, and maybe remember the faces, or a little something about each of them.
Standing outside Weequahic High School, Bashlr Muhammad Akinyele began to say the names to humanize the number.
"Forty-six," he said. "In my 20 years of teaching at Weequahic, I've had 46 students or former students (who were) killed in street violence."
Do the math. It says none of those kids lived past 39. Truth is, most died much, much younger.
Forty-six, in 20 years, but they've come more rapidly in the past few.
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"Let's see ...," Akinyele said ... "Jamaal Perry, he was the quarterback of the state championship team."
That was in 2006. In 2009, he was shot in the head. He was 21.
"Paul Hudson, good quiet kid, always respectful," the history teacher said. "He left school a few minutes early that day, turned the corner on Aldine (one block from Weequahic) and got shot."
He was an 18-year-old senior when he died in 2013.
"Tammy Henderson, another quiet kid," Akinyele said. "She died three or four days before graduation. She was supposed to take my final exam the day after she got shot."
That was in 2015. She was 19.
Coulibabry Zoumana Wilson. I called him 'Kuba baby,' " Akinyele said. "Good kid, real nice kid."
He was killed right after school one day in 2015. He was 15.
VaTorya Cooper has her own list. Five cousins -- and now one son - lost to violence on city streets. One, a woman, was stabbed to death. Two were shot "going to get food for their babies," she said.
On Tuesday night at 10 p.m. Cooper's and Akinyele's list intersected.
Rashawn Cooper, 16, VaTorya Cooper's oldest son and a freshman in Akinyele's class was shot and killed after a dispute nobody seems to know anything about.
The boy was shot in front of 100 Goodwin Ave., four blocks from his home and five blocks from his school. On Wednesday, a small pool of his blood that had collected in a pavement divot was the only evidence of Cooper's death until his Weequahic classmates started a street memorial after school. A cardboard and white poster board signs were scrawled with graffiti-like tributes to "Hot Head."
"That was the name they gave him," his mother said. The emphasis was on "they."
They, the corner boys, who hang outside the Quality Mini-Mart at the corner 75 yards from where their friend was shot.
They, the boys and young men who exchange drugs with handshakes on Clinton Place and Renner Avenue and the other South Ward streets where Rashawn Cooper lived his short life and died.
They, who stand in mid-block, watching to see who pulls over for the girls they put out there to sell their bodies and souls.
They, who scatter like wind-blown litter when someone asks what happened to their friend.
"I kept telling him, 'They ain't your friends,' " his mother said. "The police told me nobody saw anything, but how come they were posting R.I.P. on Facebook before I even knew he was dead? They know. If they were his friends, they'd say something."
There is something more troubling here than street code. It's the fear of retribution. It's also the acceptance of murder as normal.
"The painful truth is, black lives don't matter," said Akinyele. "They don't matter in the black community, they don't matter in the white community, or the police community. But the fact that they don't matter in our own black community anymore, it's just terrible. It's just sad, man."
A friend of Cooper's sat on his Suzuki sport bike near the murder scene and said, "It's sad, man, but that's the way it is. I've been living with this since I was a kid."
And how many were on his list?
"A hundred," he said. "More than a hundred."
"Violence is now a way of life for generations of kids," said Akinyele, who is a co-founder of the Newark Anti-Violence Coalition, which has been protesting violent crime by holding rallies every week since 2009.
"Years ago, when a kid from school got killed, there was shock. Now, the kids are a little more desensitized," he said. "I hate to say callous, but it doesn't seem to impact their spirit or consciousness because that's the condition they're living under. And they don't really have room to grieve for one because by the end of night, there might be another."
As Akinyele spoke on Wednesday, a group of girls from the school were returning from a field trip to the New Jersey Institute of Technology for a young women's empowerment symposium. They wore pink T-shirts that said, "I am my sister's keeper."
As they departed for home, Akinyele said, "Be safe," to each and every one.
"For many of these kids, the public schools are the safest place they can be," he said. "It's the place they can find peace and sanctuary from the violence around them."
He said Rashawn Cooper sought that, too.
"In the very last conversation we had, he told me he was getting interested in Islam," Akinyele said. "I never push my faith on anyone, but I talked to him about it. He said he was tired of the streets, that he was trying to find a way out. I told him I'd take him up the street to Masjid Ibrahim (a mosque) so he could see what it was about. That was about a month ago. He never came back to school."
"The streets sucked my boy up and didn't let go," VaTorya Cooper said, with single tears streaming down each cheek. "I've been afraid for this day a long, long time."
She has one more son, Tyrell Williams, who is 14.
"He plays basketball. He likes school," she said. "I pray I can keep him off the streets."
Rashawn's funeral was scheduled for yesterday. He leaves an extended family of people who had hoped for better for him.
In a few weeks, Cooper's street memorial will be gone, with pieces scattered among the other trash along the streets. It will be reduced to remnants, like the lone yellow strand of police tape, tied to a chain link fence, that was used to block off the intersection Tuesday night as homicide detectives gathered shell casings and other evidence.
By Wednesday, the old-timers on the block were cutting their small lawns, or gathering together on porches. The smell of marijuana wafted through the air off other stoops, where the kids sat. The corner boys were out; so were the girls, some so clearly high they couldn't keep their balance.
Life here, such as it is, goes on, waiting for the next kid to die, and the next, and the next.
Mark Di Ionno may be reached at mdiionno@starledger.com. Follow The Star-Ledger on Twitter @StarLedger and find us on Facebook.
