Philadelphia can’t even protect those who try to protect our children

I went to the Mill Creek pool last month to visit with Robin Borlandoe (better known as Lifeguard Grandma) on her last weekend on the job after she’d answered the city’s desperate call for lifeguards.

I left impressed by all the workers I met at the West Philadelphia recreation center and, really, all city rec centers where dedicated residents are doing their part to help keep children occupied and safe.

Now, one of them is dead.

It was horrifying to hear about Tiffany Fletcher, a 41-year-old mother of three who was working at Mill Creek on the afternoon of Sept. 9 when she was caught in a crossfire of teenagers shooting at one another. One suspect, Makie Jones, is 14. He was charged as an adult with murder.

That a 14-year-old — a boy much like the children Fletcher and so many others across the city step up to try to guide and protect every day — was charged with her murder just makes it all the more gutting.

I didn’t meet Fletcher when I was at Mill Creek in August, but it was apparent that the staff was a tight-knit bunch.

“She started the same time I did,” Borlandoe told me this week. “And like everyone else, she just meshed. She was good to talk to — there early, just a nice person.”

When Charles McKnight, the assistant recreation leader at Mill Creek, first met Fletcher earlier this year, he asked if she wanted to enroll her children in the center’s tuition-based summer camp program.

“Does that come with a job, too?” McKnight recalled her joking.

McKnight handed her an application and Fletcher was later hired as a maintenance worker at the rec center.

Whenever people commented on the cleanliness of the playground, McKnight quickly gave Fletcher the credit.

“We cleaned up, but she cleaned,” he told me.

On the day of the shooting, McKnight had just driven up to the rec center when gun shots rang out above his car.

After the shooting stopped, workers rushed to account for everyone and realized Fletcher was missing. Fletcher had been having trouble with her phone, so McKnight didn’t worry right away when he called her and she didn’t pick up. But then police said a woman fitting her description had been shot.

As McKnight and I spoke, I could hear a familiar weight in his voice that was present in everyone I’d talked to about Fletcher’s death.

As of Sept. 15, there have been 387 homicides and 1,705 shootings in the city since the beginning of the year. Since 2020, police said, there have been 705 shootings within 400 feet from rec centers. But Kathryn Ott Lovell, the city’s Parks and Recreation commissioner, told me she believed this was the first time a recreation employee had been killed while on duty, leaving many of us to ask: How do we better protect those who answer the call to help protect the city’s children?

It is a question with no easy answer.

Metal detectors wouldn’t have helped.

Neither would the city’s 10 p.m. curfew for minors, as the shooting occurred around 1:30 p.m.

And it would have been difficult for the police to have responded any faster. Officers assigned to safeguard the rec center while the pool was open were so close that they heard the gunshots and were at Mill Creek within moments. The 14-year-old suspect was arrested almost immediately.

One thing I’m all but certain of: The answer isn’t in the city’s recent announcement that it will offer $10,000 rewards for tips that lead to the arrest and conviction of anyone who fires a gun and wounds others near schools, recreation centers, and libraries. City officials already offer $20,000 for information about homicides, but according to their records, only 54 people have claimed those rewards since 2016 — a period when there were upward of 2,750 homicides.

Which leaves that familiar refrain when a young person does something horrible: Where are the parents?

“I know times have changed and you can’t say, ‘I remember the good old days,’ but if I got caught vandalizing a store or — God forbid — carrying a gun or even seeing a gun, my parents would have taken the necessary precautions to make sure it didn’t happen again,” Mayor Jim Kenney said during the city’s biweekly gun-violence briefing held earlier this week.

While statements like that always strike me as conveniently nostalgic, parents should answer for their children’s actions. I just wish that as a society we’d be as full-throated about parental accountability when the young person in question isn’t Black or brown.

Look, I don’t know where this 14-year-old’s parents were. But I do know where a lot of parents in this city are — and that’s trying to save kids, often while their own are worrying about them.

When Borlandoe texted her daughters about the shooting, one immediately texted back.

“You’re not going back there.”

Borlandoe understood her concern and fear; she shared it.

But she didn’t respond because she knew her answer would upset her daughter even more.

Borlandoe would have liked to be assigned to a pool closer to her home in Southwest Philly next year. But that’s no longer a consideration.

She’s going back to Mill Creek.

“If everybody leaves, then what’s going to happen?” she said.

When she returns, McKnight, himself a father whose children also worry about his safety, will still be there. (Those who are able can also show their support for Fletcher by contributing to a fund that’s been set up for her children.)

“Whatever you can do, you do,” he said, echoing a reality repeated by so many others: Philadelphia won’t survive if we succumb to fear.

This is, without question, a time for action. Something must be done to make Philadelphia safer. If not, we are headed toward a dangerous tipping point when even those who care enough to help others may be reluctant to do so out of a justified concern for their own well-being.

And what will become of our city if those who live in fear ever outnumber those who live in the spirit of hope?