Philly has failed its children, when kids as young as 10 turn themselves in after a homicide

I’m not one for waxing nostalgic about the good old days, but we have really lost something.

On Monday, two boys, ages 10 and 14, turned themselves in to police after the murder of a 73-year-old man, who was beaten with a traffic cone. A 14-year-old girl did the same two days later.

When I heard about this, all I could think was that Philadelphia has failed its children. Something like this should never have happened. Kids aren’t supposed to be roaming around outside at all hours, or laughing as they fatally assault an elderly man on Cecil B. Moore Avenue. No adult was outside smoking a cigarette around 2:30 a.m. on June 24 and saw fit to yell out: Hey, what are you all doing out there?

Back in the day, “the neighbors were the village. They policed you. They parented. They would tell your parents if they saw you doing something that you weren’t supposed to do, and before they told your parents, they would say something to you. You really couldn’t get away with a lot,” Christine Brown, director of community services for Beech Companies and who grew up near where the attack took place, told me. “Things are just different. Children don’t speak to their seniors, and seniors are afraid to live in their own community, and that’s sad.”

“This is cultural dysfunction,” pointed out Ricky Duncan of NoMo, which stands for New Options, More Opportunities. “When I was coming up, somebody out there would have seen me and redirected me back to my home. They would have grabbed me by my collar and walked me back to my home and knocked on my door and let [my family] know that Little Ricky was running around the neighborhood at 2 o’clock in the morning.”

Like Brown and Duncan, I came of age during a time when the neighbors on my block all knew each other. They looked out for us when we were under age, and wouldn’t have hesitated to let my parents know exactly what I was up to if I had dared to even think of being outside when I wasn’t supposed to.

But it’s not only up to neighbors and the parents to keep kids in line. When children are involved in a homicide, that represents a failure of every aspect of their lives, from home to school to policing to social services. Some of the young people on the video of that incident appear to have violent instincts — why wasn’t that dealt with earlier?

Raina Major, the attorney for two of the minors allegedly involved in the assault, told me on Wednesday that her clients had spent the night at another boy’s house. “Unfortunately, it wasn’t like when you and I snuck out of the house and nothing happened. This went awry because of the situation that they found themselves in.”

The parents may not have known the kids were out on the street that night. And not all of the kids who were present for the assault may have been equally involved. But whatever the details, the conclusion is the same: When children end up involved in a homicide, we have failed them. Times have changed a lot from when I was growing up, but there’s still nothing normal about 10- and 14-year-olds being out on the streets of Philly after midnight.

And there’s certainly nothing normal about what happened to the late James Lambert.

» READ MORE: 14-year-old boy charged in traffic cone beating death of 73-year-old Philly man

Surveillance video shows a teen hoisting a traffic cone above his head before striking the 73-year-old as he crossed Cecil B. Moore Avenue. Then, a girl in her stocking feet with a pair of sunglasses atop her head can be seen retrieving the cone and appearing to do the same thing. It looks as if she strikes the elderly man not once but twice. Another child appears to be holding up a phone to videotape what was happening as another rides his scooter. Lambert died the following day of his injuries.

Authorities charged a 14-year-old, Richard Jones, as an adult and released the 10-year-old. Richard now faces third-degree murder and conspiracy charges.

It’s time for us to be the community that these kids need — call them out, hold them responsible, and give them the support they’ve obviously been missing.

“A lot of these people are fearing our young people, which is a bad thing,” said Duncan, whose nonprofit last year got a $1 million grant from the city to bolster community involvement in battling the gun violence epidemic. “I’m not even just going to blame the parents, because again you’ve got to blame the community as a whole because it takes a village to raise a child. Men, especially our Black men in our community, we can’t allow these kids to run our neighborhoods. We have to [step] outside the box and say, ‘Listen. I’m not letting Little Joey walk past me at 12 or 1 o’clock at night.’”

If the old African proverb is true — that it takes a village to raise a child — then the one that raised the children who attacked Lambert failed miserably.