The mother of Roxborough shooting victim Nicolas Elizalde, 14, has a message: ‘He isn’t a number’

Nicolas Elizalde had begged his mother to let him play football for years, but she always said no, too worried about the injuries that can come with the sport.

This year, Nick was starting high school in a new area, and needed a way to make friends. So Meredith Elizalde gave in. And in August, they trekked to the athletic store to buy him a new pair of cleats.

They were the cleats that she saw from afar on Tuesday, as she ran toward the sound of gunfire outside Roxborough High School.

But even before she saw them, she knew.

“I just knew it was going to be him,” she said.

She ran up the hill, as crowds of others playing and watching the football scrimmage fled the area. At the bottom of the school staircase, she found her only child on the ground with a gunshot wound to his chest. She grabbed her son and held him in the dirt. Help was on the way, but with traffic, it wasn’t arriving soon enough.

“I touched his face, and I said, ‘I love you, and I’m here,’” she said. “And I kept calling his name, and said, ‘I’m here, I’m here.’”

A police officer scooped them both, and Meredith held her son as long as she could in the backseat of the cruiser.

“I felt him go,” she said.

On his behalf, she recited the shahada, an Islamic declaration of faith, as he took his final breath.

Doctors at Einstein Medical Center could not revive him.

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Police said five gunmen unleashed more than 60 shots on a small group of Roxborough football players as they walked toward their locker room. Investigators believe the shooters, who they have said are also juveniles, were potentially targeting a 17-year-old who was near the group but not on the team.

Four other boys, ages 14 to 17, were shot. They remain in stable condition. The shooters arrived and fled in a stolen SUV and have not been caught.

The violence upended the community, drawing outrage from politicians, professional athletes, and city leaders who questioned where, if not at school and extracurricular activities, the city’s children could be safe.

And Nick’s family is shattered, his mother forced to grieve the loss of her only child, propping herself up only by the notion that maybe her son was too good for this world.

“God took him to protect him from what this world was going to do to him,” said Elizalde, a teacher at School of the Future in West Philly. “But I will speak for him. I will work the rest of my life so that he isn’t forgotten. He isn’t a number.”

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Nicolas Gabriel Elizalde was born at Crozer-Chester Medical Center in Upland and grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs, spending most of his formative years in Havertown, Delaware County. After attending Havertown Middle School, he was interested in diversifying his friends and studies for high school, his mother said. He was accepted into Walter B. Saul High, in Roxborough, and they planned to move into the neighborhood Dec. 1.

Because Saul does not have its own athletic teams, he played for Roxborough. He loved basketball — especially the 76ers — and planned to play for the school team come winter. On the football team, he played corner. His favorite athletes — like Jalen Hurts, Furkan Korkmaz, Giannis Antetokounmpo, and Malcolm Jenkins — inspired him on and off the field, his mom said.

“He was happier than he’s ever been,” Elizalde said.

He loved all things science, sci-fi movies like Star Wars and the Marvel films, and animals, especially his Aunt Margie’s pug, Tag. He had recently become interested in botany and plant medicine, his mother said. For his 15th birthday, which he would have celebrated Oct. 8, she bought him a guide to Indigenous communities’ healing rituals. It was delivered Thursday, two days after he died.

Nick engaged in politics from a young age, his mother said, but the 2016 election fueled his drive to stand up against injustices. He attended protests and marches across the region with his mother for Black Lives Matter, abortion rights, climate change, and stopping gun violence.

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His father, Manuel, is from Almoloya de Alquisiras, Mexico, and Nick was proud of his Chicano roots.

He never disobeyed his parents, and he was so gentle, Elizalde said, that even when she’d tell him to stand up to a bully, he would refuse: “I could just make him my friend instead,” she recalled him saying.

“He wouldn’t even kill bugs,” said his grandmother, Marge LaRue. “We used to trap them, and release them outside.”

He made his bed every morning and kept his room tidy. Tuesday, before heading to school, he left a note atop his stuffed animals, reminding himself which Invisalign braces he needed through the week.

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It was still there Friday, his room a snapshot of innocence and youth: his Guardians of the Galaxy bedding; personal paintings of wolves and elephants on the walls; a plush cheetah animal draped across his headboard. His dresser was lined with figurines of Star Wars characters and his favorite Sixer, Joel Embiid, and a ticket stub to the 76ers game he attended with his mom over the summer lay carefully in the corner.

Nick could be shy, but to those who knew him, he was cheerful and funny. He invented nicknames for his friends and gave great advice, they said.

”Nick was a sweet, nice, shy, and funny person,” a ninth-grade classmate wrote in a recent school assignment. “Nick did not deserve [to die]. ... He was never doing anything wrong. He was a very humble person.”

He was one of the first people Rafael Arias met at Saul. They shared a homeroom and walks through their picturesque campus.

“He loved to talk about football, he was excited about his games,” said Arias, 14. “He was a very open person, and he had a lot of friends.”

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Nick read for fun, even the newspaper. He and his grandmother loved sharing articles from The Inquirer’s sports section and discussing current events, she said.

His reading translated into school essays, where he was thoughtful and witty. A recent assignment showed how he reflected on the people in his life: His mother, who ensured he was loved, nurtured, and supported. His father, with whom he enjoyed movies like The Matrix. His grandma, who “would cook for me like I was her own son.” His tia, who made him feel safe, and uncle who played football with him.

“These are the people who run my world,” he said.

Just six days before his death, he wrote an English paper about why people break rules, nodding to figures he admired, like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi, who he said broke laws for higher purposes.

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He was rarely disciplined at home, he said, but recognized that was partly a privilege, writing, in what would become a sad irony, that some people break rules not because they are inherently bad but perhaps they “are sometimes doing it out of their bad situations.”

Nick’s corneas were donated and used to save the vision of two people, his mom said. His family has found some comfort in this in the aftermath, holding on to a hope that those recipients will see the world as Nick did: with gentleness and unwavering love.