A month after a 12-year-old was killed, city leaders are absent. And children on the block are too afraid to play.

In the month since a 12-year-old was shot and killed on his birthday, the child’s family and neighbors have not seen their mayor or Council members or top police brass.

A state representative stopped by earlier this week, but overall, there’s been no collective outrage that Laron “LJ” Williams was gunned down outside his East Germantown home and died in his parents’ arms.

“Somebody should have come for the child,” Al Anderson said of city leaders at his nephew’s vigil. “A 12-year-old is killed on his birthday, and no one comes out here.”

Instead, in the weeks since L.J. — a playful child some called the “soul of the block” — was killed, it’s been neighbors supporting one another and the heartbroken Williams family. Community members have dropped off home-cooked meals and sent money. Neighborhood children signed a basketball and gave it to L.J.’s parents as a gift. People on the block have surrounded the family with endless prayer.

Some residents were angry about the absent leadership, while others were unsurprised. They’re used to relying on each other for support — a testament to the community they’ve built, but also to decades of feeling neglected by the city.

“We’re kind of like the lost community,” said Dorothea Chavis, a 40-year resident of the 700 block of East Locust Avenue. “But we’re also the last village.”

And that neglect, residents said, is what created the conditions — the widespread drug sales, lack of safe spaces for children to play, and escalating blight and violence — that they believe contributed to L.J.’s killing.

“This is the way things are set up for us,” said Derek Everett, 38. “It’s not the people’s fault that they’re trying to survive.”

Each morning in the summer, the children of Locust Avenue would gather at the end of the block and wait for their mayor.

What would they do today? Play basketball or football? Ride bikes or scooters? Fill up a wagon with bottles of water and sell them to passersby?

“Mayor L.J.,” as the children called him, would decide what the day would hold.

“It had to be L.J.’s idea,” said Chavis, 63, better known as Ms. Dottie. “If he wasn’t in it, it was boring.”

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Rain or shine, L.J. spent his days outside, to the point where, in the summer, the ends of his afro would turn a sandy bleached color, said his mother, Michelle Brister.

The youngest of three children, L.J. had such a personality that neighbors called him “the block captain” or their “Dennis,” inspired by the energetic 1950s character “Dennis the Menace.” He’d sit on neighbors’ porches and tell jokes, and they’d have to shoo him home at the end of the day.

But he’d also help people carry in their groceries, and would rush over to Deborah Drakeford’s house across the street to prove that he’d finished his homework in hopes she might slip him a few dollars as a reward.

“He was a pain in the butt, but he was ours,” said Everett.

When June 22 came around, the whole block knew it was L.J.’s 12th birthday — he’d been talking about it for weeks.

That morning, he’d played games on his mother’s phone, then he checked in with Drakeford, 61, who passes out daily lunches through the city’s summer meals program, to find out what was on the menu. He beamed about his big day, Drakeford said, and had plans to go paintballing that evening with his father.

But as L.J. headed home around 2 p.m., a man with a rifle jumped out of a car and started shooting down the block. The shooter — seeking vengeance in a drug feud — fired at least 11 times, police said. Khalif Chambers, 30, and Riley Darden, 47, were struck, and collapsed on top of one another.

L.J. was caught in the crossfire, shot multiple times in the chest and back. He tried to run home, and made it up the front steps, where he collapsed. His Aunt Elaine was there and held him, she said. His parents rushed outside and neighbors attempted CPR and held pressure to his wounds.

“I was holding him, and he looked at me and smiled,” Elaine Williams said. “Then he took a few deep breaths. And then he stopped.”

Everett helped L.J.’s father put the child in the back of a police car. He was rushed to the hospital, but he died upon arrival.

And for the next three days, Locust Avenue was quiet.

To lose L.J. was to lose the “soul of the block,” said neighbor and family friend Jaki Walker.

“A whole block was mourning,” said Rose Lloyd. “For three days straight, you could hear a pin drop.”

“I don’t ever question God or Allah, but this gotta be reversed,” Walker said. “They destroyed a whole neighborhood.”

At least 250 people attended L.J.’s vigil and funeral. Even people who didn’t know him but had ties to the area came out of respect for the Williams family, who’ve lived on the block since the 1970s.

It was 26 days before an elected official came by the family’s home. On Tuesday, State Rep. Stephen Kinsey met with L.J.’s relatives to offer his condolences and ask how he could support them. He said he was organizing a community prayer and vigil with neighborhood leaders for later this week.

Brister, L.J.’s mother, was grateful for his support and said she was not taking the absence of others personally. Maybe people were out of town, she said, plus she’s been focused on holding her loved ones together in the face of grief.

But others on the block felt differently.

“It is July 18. That child died June 22,” Chavis said the morning of Kinsey’s Tuesday visit. “Are you really that busy?”

Since the shooting, there have been more police on the block, and the city installed a new surveillance camera at the top of a light pole.

But Chavis and Brister questioned why a camera wasn’t already there, considering officials knew of the block’s problems.

“It took a child getting killed to get the camera,” Brister said.

East Germantown has seen its fair share of gun violence.

Including last month’s shooting, nine people have been shot on the 700 block of East Locust Avenue since 2018, according to city data. Just two weeks before the shooting that killed L.J., gunfire erupted and sent bullets through home and car windows. No one was injured.

The violence is largely driven by a “highly organized” marijuana sales operation in the neighborhood, and the corner of Chew and Locust Avenues is the epicenter, said Philadelphia Police Inspector Nick Smith, who oversees the four Northwest police districts.

It doesn’t matter what kind of drug is being sold, he said, “with drug sales is violence.”

“We’re not talking about, say, a drug corner with one or two guys,” Smith said in an interview. “You’ll have about 15 individuals selling narcotics simultaneously.”

“This isn’t nickel and dimes,” he said. “They’re making thousands of dollars a day.”

The size of the operation, and the fact that they’re selling marijuana, which was decriminalized in 2014, has made it difficult to police, he said.

The motives behind the shootings vary and can be difficult to determine, he said. The operation has no competition — there’s no “turf war” or “rival groups,” he said. He remembered one man was shot after attempting to pay for weed with counterfeit money, and other times violence has been triggered by internal feuds.

The specific motive behind the shooting that killed L.J. remains unclear, but police say it was drug-related. Detectives have not recovered a weapon or any video of the shooting, and have no cooperating witnesses, said Staff Inspector Ernest Ransom.

But a ballistics test of the cartridge casings recovered at the scene showed that the gun used that day was used in two earlier homicides: the deaths of I-Dean Fulton, of Manayunk, in February 2020, and Wesley Miller, in East Germantown, in May 2022.

The drug dealing — and the associated violence — weigh on neighbors.

Longtime homeowners reminisce over how calm and quiet the street was when they’d moved in decades ago, alongside neighbors who swept the sidewalk and scrubbed their steps. But in the last 10 years or so, they said, homeowners have moved away and loitering and noise levels increased. Trash littered the sidewalks and abandoned homes became eyesores.

Chavis said she doesn’t sit in her front window anymore for fear of stray bullets.

Still, the sense of community never faded. Drakeford hand-delivers the lunches to children’s homes if they can’t come in person. (She said the city almost discontinued the program to the block after the shooting, out of safety concerns, but reversed its decision.)

And Chavis and other residents still try to show kindness to the young men on the corners.

“I’m not going to condone what you do,” Chavis said. “But showing love is a lost art. These children feel unloved.”

L.J.’s friends and family, meanwhile, are taking things one day at a time.

Brister said she’s heard of plans to install a mural of L.J. on the block, and maybe one day change the name of the street to honor him.

Most residents said they needed counseling after what they witnessed that day. Folks lamented how city services aimed at helping victims’ families can take months to access, and that there are few resources available for extended family or witnesses to violence.

“Every time I come outside, I see his face,” said Drakeford.

A once lively block where more than a dozen children ran up and down the streets, laughing and playing, has grown quiet. Kids are mostly staying indoors — their parents worried that retaliatory shootings are on the horizon, some traumatized after witnessing their friend’s death.

“This whole block needs therapy,” said Rose Lloyd.

Everett said he wants the city or nearby La Salle University to beautify some of the vacant lots for children to play on. And some said they want to see a stronger police presence, but they’re tired of officers not interacting with residents.

“Sure, there’s a cop right there, but you know what he do all day? He sit in his car and he stares at his phone, and he prays to God that nothing happens so he doesn’t have to work,” Everett said.

Chavis said the same: “They’re nice, they always wave. But I want to get to know them. I want them to get to know us and the L.J.s of the neighborhood.”

After all, Everett said, if police built relationships with residents and understood their struggles, maybe they’d have an easier time finding out who killed this child.