Anger, pain and fear revealed at ‘Community Healing Town Hall’ at Imhotep Charter School after a student was killed

Dayemen Taylor was 17 and a junior at Imhotep Institute Charter School when he was killed in a barrage of bullets at a SEPTA bus stop last week.

In the aftermath of that March 4 shooting that also wounded four others, and another after-school SEPTA bus stop shooting two days later that injured eight Northeast High students, two City Council officials called for a “Community Healing Town Hall” meeting at Imhotep Charter on Wednesday night. There have been no arrests in the shooting that claimed Taylor’s life. Three suspects in the shooting of the Northeast High students have been arrested and an arrest warrant has been issued for a fourth person.

A standing-room-only crowd of nearly 300 people gathered in the school’s cafeteria.

When Chris Northern, 16, a sophomore at Martin Luther King High, got up to say a few words, he choked back tears.

“I heard the gunshots,” Northern later told The Inquirer. “But I wasn’t surprised.” When he heard the shooting, he said he thought: “Somebody else has lost their life.” Northern lives in West Oak Lane, close to the bus stop at Ogontz and West Godfrey Avenues where Taylor was killed.

» READ MORE: Marshals identify 4th suspect in Burholme bus stop shooting that wounded 8 teenagers

Although he walks to school and doesn’t have to take a bus, he said he still worries that he and his friends are always in danger of being shot

“I’m scared,” he said in an interview. “I don’t want to die.”

Every day he gets up to go to school, he said, he worries that the clothing he and his peers wear could make them a target.

He was wearing black sweatpants and a black Under Armour hoodie, and he pulled out a black ski mask that he said he doesn’t wear over his face, but as a cap.

“Look at what I’m wearing,” he said, and then pointed to the group of MLK students with whom he attended the town hall meeting.

“We all dress the same. It’s a trend. But there’s kids out there who want to dress a certain way because somebody they follow, an influencer, or a celebrity, dresses that way.” So he said he is thinking about changing how he dresses. He said jealousy pushes the violence.

Although Northern didn’t know Taylor, he said he has lost two close friends, who were 15 and 16, who were also killed by violence.

Milton Shabazz went to the town hall meeting with his year-old daughter, Zora, and 16-year-old stepson, Zion Sutton.

Shabazz didn’t know Northern before Wednesday night’s meeting. But Shabazz, who wore a T-shirt that read: “Black Fathers Are Necessary,” got up with his daughter in his arms and walked across the cafeteria to talk to him.

He shook Northern’s hand, and then he hugged him.

“That took courage to get up to talk,” Shabazz told Northern. “Protect each other, take care of yourselves,” he told him and the other teens from MLK. Then he borrowed a piece of paper, wrote down his phone number and gave it to Northern.

For much of the meeting, leaders of community organizations, such as Mothers In Charge , Ceasefire PA, and Shoot Basketballs, Not Guns, and of dozens more got up to talk about what they are doing to try to reach children and teenagers to keep them safe.

City Councilmember Cindy Bass, who with City Council President Kenyatta Johnson, organized the Town Hall , asked all of the speakers to make sure to give their contact information to her staff.

“We can’t do this work alone,” she said.

Some speakers called on the community organizations to stop fighting with each other and some said the city officials who attended Wednesday’s meeting came “to be part of a photo-op.”

One man , who said he has both a son and a grandson who attends Imhotep, denounced the officials. “There was a Career Day here at the school, the day before the shooting. But no one from the city showed up,” he said. “You all who are sitting there need to come and tell our children how you got to be in those positions.”

It wasn’t until after the meeting was supposed to have ended that Pastor Dicie Gilmore, Dayemen Taylor’s cousin, got up to speak.

Gilmore painted a harsh picture of what she called intergenerational violence in the city. She wore a T-shirt with a photo of her son Nasir, who she said was 25 when he was killed. She befriended the young man who killed her son, she said, but her son’s killer was also killed three years later.

Gilmore said Dayemen Taylor had been named for an uncle who, some 20 years ago, had been killed at age 19. And she said Dayemen’s grandfather had also been killed in the streets: he had gotten into a fight outside a bar, and when he turned to walk inside, he was shot in the back.

Gilmore said she herself had been in gangs and been “in the streets.” She called on families to get their lives together, and for parents and grandparents to be an example.

“Our children are watching what we do,” she said. “This all starts in the home. This is generational, and we’ve got to stop it now.”