‘I’m grateful to be alive’: Victim of West Philly rec center shooting heals as three accused gunmen face charges

Three of the men accused of opening fire during a drive-by shooting outside a West Philadelphia rec center this week — an incident that left five people wounded, two of them critically — have been charged with crimes including attempted murder, aggravated assault, and conspiracy, court records show.

Tahmir Pinckney, Azyear Sutton-Walker, and Marlon Spurell, who are all 22 years old, were arraigned overnight Thursday and jailed on $3 million bail each, court records show. All were being represented by the Defender Association, which declined to comment Thursday morning.

Police said the men were among six people who began shooting out of a white Dodge Durango around 7 p.m. Tuesday on the 300 block of North 57th Street, just steps from the Shepard Recreation Center, where dozens of people were outside playing basketball, football, or otherwise enjoying a summer evening.

Collin Lanham, who was sitting in his car outside the rec center when the shots rang out, took a bullet to the shoulder when the gunfire erupted. It was terrifying, he said.

“I’m still a little shaken up,” he said in an interview Thursday. “You never expect that to happen to you, but it could be anybody.

“Everything happened so fast that it didn’t seem real. Everything happened in about 10 seconds,” said Lanham, 25, who was double-parked on 57th Street as he waited to pick up a friend who coached a youth football team. He bolted from his car and ran to avoid being shot again, he said.

Lanham, a technician at a cell-therapy company, was at home Thursday, recovering from the gunshot wound and feeling emotionally battered.

“I’m in pain,” he said. “I can’t really use my left arm, but other than that, I’m grateful to be alive.”

The shooters appeared to take aim at three males — ages 17, 21, and 22 — who had just walked off the basketball court onto 57th Street, police said. All three were hit, police said, along with two bystanders, including Lanham.

Nearly 100 shots were fired — some from assault-style rifles — before the gunmen drove away in the Durango.

Officers nearby heard the gunshots and drove toward the scene, police said, where they saw a man with a gun getting into the SUV. The officers pursued the car, which crashed about a mile away, and then chased the men who got out and ran.

Pinckney, Sutton-Walker, and Spurell were caught and arrested, police said. On Thursday, Capt. John Walker said officers were still searching for three other men who could be seen on surveillance video running from the car after the crash.

Walker said investigators believe the shooting was related to an ongoing feud between groups of young men — with the shooters in the car on one side of the dispute, and the victims on the other. One of the victims shot Tuesday had also been shot several weeks ago, Walker said, and police were investigating any potential links between the two cases.

Walker said police found four guns at the scene of the shooting, and six in the crashed Durango — including two assault-style rifles, both of which were fired outside the rec center.

Walker said at least one of the guns recovered at 57th Street was legally owned by one of the shooting victims. . Detectives were still investigating who might have possessed the other firearms found on the street.

At the time of the shooting, court records show, Spurell was free on bail in a drug case from April, when he was arrested at Philadelphia International Airport with a quantity of marijuana that prosecutors said indicated an intention to sell. A trial is scheduled for later this month.

Pinckney pleaded no contest to a drug charge in 2019 and was sentenced to a year of probation, court records show.

In the rec center shooting, Pinckney, Sutton-Walker, and Spurell were arraigned at 1:30 a.m. Thursday. They are due back in court for a preliminary hearing later this month.

As is the case in most shootings in Philadelphia, the accused gunmen and the victims in this week’s attack are young Black males, a fact that Lanham said causes him added grief.

Since 2015, more than 10,000 people have been shot in Philadelphia. Three out of four were Black males, and the median age for victims was 26, according to city crime data analyzed by The Inquirer.

More than 80% of homicide victims in Philadelphia are Black men, according to the data.

“It’s becoming normal, and it’s not something I think people should be normalizing,” said Lanham. “When you read about it you can brush it off. But when you actually see it go down, you can see there’s no unity in the Black community at all. We already have so many barriers to overcome, why tear each other down?”

To the shooters, he said: “Y’all had so much more life. You could have done so much more positive things with your life and your energy. You wasted it and it’s gone now. You don’t have a second chance to correct your wrongs.”