‘He was just a baby’: The family of a 13-year-old who was fatally shot remember him as a loving, protective boy

It was 6:36 p.m. Monday when Jasmine Wilcox spoke on the phone with her 13-year-old son, Jeremiah, for what she did not know would be the last time.

“Jeremiah, you OK?” she asked.

“Yes, Mom, I’m outside talking to my friends,” Wilcox recalled her son saying. “And I said, ‘OK it’s a school night. Be home by 8.”

Twelve minutes later, Jeremiah was shot twice, struck in the head and body, police said, as he stood outside his friend’s house in West Oak Lane.

When the shots rang out, a 14-year-old friend and his mother rushed to Jeremiah’s side as he lay bleeding on the sidewalk in front of their house. They did CPR and put pressure on his wounds, the mother said, but his injuries were too severe. She sat by the boy’s side until police arrived and rushed him to Einstein Medical Center, where he died about three hours later.

No arrests have been made or suspects identified, said Deputy Commissioner Frank Vanore, and investigators are working to recover video from the scene on the 6500 block of North Smedley Street. They have no answers yet as to why someone would have wanted such a young boy dead.

“He was just a baby,” cried his aunt Jamillah Patterson. “He didn’t deserve this.”

On Tuesday, Jasmine Wilcox, sitting in the kitchen of her West Oak Lane home, held one of her son’s navy blue shirts up to her nose, closed her eyes, and took deep breaths. It still smelled like him, she said.

Jeremiah Wilcox, aka “Jay” or “Jerry,” was a sweet, funny boy, who was protective of his family and loved his mama, she said. He had a bright smile and loved to make his family laugh, they said, but wasn’t afraid to speak his mind if something was bothering him. He liked football and basketball, and played casually with friends. In his free time, he watched anime and played video games like Fortnite and Call of Duty with his cousins.

Cheesesteaks were his favorite food, and he got his sweet tooth from his mom, she said.

He kept the waves in his hair fresh, his family said, and he knew he was handsome, always talking to and flirting with girls.

» READ MORE: A weekend of gun violence in Philadelphia shows the incalculable, yet cruelly normal, level of trauma that residents must endure.

Jeremiah was an eighth grader at Wagner Middle School, just a block from where he was shot. He and his mom had started looking at high schools for next year, she said, and he was interested in attending Roxborough High for its engineering program and football team.

Wilcox was 16 when she had Jeremiah, she said, and she raised him largely on her own. They were best friends, by each other’s side throughout life’s obstacles.

“We grew up together,” she said. “Anywhere I went, he went.”

Jeremiah had his ups and downs in school, his mom said, but he never got into any serious trouble. He was resilient, and having grown up with a single mother, Wilcox said, Jeremiah took on the “man of the house” role at a young age. He worked in the neighborhood helping elderly neighbors weed their gardens and picking up odd jobs.

He was a gentle mama’s boy, Wilcox said — Jeremiah and his 5-year-old sister used to fight over who could crawl into bed and cuddle with her. For his 13th birthday in June, he and his cousins went to a movie and afterward played with Silly String and party-snapper fireworks at the house.

Just this past Saturday, Wilcox said, she and her older sister were talking about the gun violence crisis in the city. Patterson moved her family to Delaware in July, she said, to get away from the violence. It was a wake-up call, Patterson said, when her daughter told her she was worried she wouldn’t live to see her 14th birthday.

“I just said on Saturday that this was my fear,” Wilcox said.

So far this year, 187 juveniles have been shot in Philadelphia. Twenty-six have died. Just two weeks ago, five teens were shot outside Roxborough High School after a football scrimmage.

The Wilcox family, gathered in their West Oak Lane home Tuesday, said Philadelphia’s young people need to see that the city is invested in protecting them — funding their neighborhood parks, schools, and rec centers, and giving them safe places to go on their free time — or more young people like Jeremiah will die.

“The kids are our future,” said close friend Zah Harris.

“We are losing our future,” added cousin Dontayia Walker. “We’re being buried together.”

And the mother of the friend whose house Jeremiah was in front of when he was shot similarly wondered when enough is enough. The woman, who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation, said she has lived in the West Oak Lane home since she was 11 and hoped to pass it along to her children the way her parents did to her.

But Monday night, as her 10-year-old daughter cried to her, “I don’t wanna die, Mom, I don’t wanna die,” she knew they couldn’t return.

They’re staying at her sister’s now, she said. She’ll put her house on the market soon.

“You think you have this safe haven,” she said. “Then somebody takes it from you.”

Staff writer Dylan Purcell contributed to this article.