Teen doesn't survive another brush with death

A YOUNG WOMAN curled up into a ball Wednesday morning on a weather-beaten North Philadelphia porch, nestled against an old wicker chair. She mouthed a few words into a cordless phone, her voice barely above a whisper. Her head dipped to her chest, and she sobbed.

Aaron McDaniels' luck had finally run out.

The 19-year-old was fatally shot by a police officer after he allegedly pointed a loaded 9 mm semiautomatic handgun at the cop during a dramatic encounter Tuesday night on Glenwood Avenue near 22nd Street.

Now relatives were flocking to his family's house on Lehigh Avenue near 16th Street, filing past the wicker porch furniture where the young woman wept.

In a cover story May 29, the Daily News profiled McDaniels, using a pseudonym, as part of its ongoing "Under the Gun" series. He had survived two shootings, the more serious of which was last August when he was hit six times by an unknown assailant at a neighborhood barbecue.

His heart stopped twice in the terror-filled moments that followed that shooting, he said, and he ended up losing a lung.

"I know I can't get shot no more," he told a reporter, after lifting his T-shirt to reveal a jagged terrain of scars that stretched across his chest.

McDaniels, like so many other at-risk inner-city youths, was living a life that seemed destined to end in tragedy.

It wasn't always that way, of course. He came from a loving family - mom and dad, three older siblings - got good grades, loved playing basketball.

But by his own account, he veered down a different path as a teenager, getting kicked out of two schools for selling drugs and fighting, before he was arrested on a gun-possession charge.

He ended up at Glen Mills Schools, in Delaware County, a home for court-referred young men, where he lived until the gunfire felled him last August while he was out on a weekend pass.

When the Daily News sat down with McDaniels for a pair of interviews earlier this year, he was recuperating and finishing his sentence while under house arrest. (The People Paper called him "Allen" to protect him from additional harm.)

He was unsure of whether he'd take up a relative's offer to move out of the city, away from everything and everyone he knew.

"It'd be better, and it would be hard, like starting a whole new life," he said. "But my friends, they'd think I was a sellout."

Those words made McDaniels' uncle Rasheem Vaughan cringe as he stood Wednesday outside McDaniels' house.

"He graduated. Just got off house arrest," Vaughan said, shaking his head.

"I told him, 'Slow down, take a look at the bigger picture. There's more to life than these streets. There's more to it than North Philly.' "

Friends and relatives trickled in and out of the house as Vaughan looked on. McDaniels' mother and siblings were too upset to come outside and talk, he said.

Vaughan said he constantly had offered McDaniels little nuggets of wisdom, especially on avoiding neighborhood troublemakers.

"If you hang around with some people who have nothing, they won't want you to have nothing, neither," he said.

Police said McDaniels was a passenger Tuesday night in a Buick LeSabre driven by Kareem Gordon, 19. Patrol cops tried to stop them for blowing past a stop sign near Carlisle and Huntingdon streets about 7:40 p.m., but the LeSabre sped off.

The car slammed into a Plymouth Voyager minivan at 22nd and Glenwood - none of the four occupants was injured - and stopped on a sidewalk, police said.

Gordon, who has prior arrests on aggravated-assault and narcotics charges, fled on foot, but later was arrested and charged with firearms violations.

An officer approached the passenger's side of the car and ordered McDaniels to show his hands. Police said McDaniels allegedly opened the door and pointed a 9 mm at the cop, who opened fire. A loaded Smith & Wesson .357-caliber revolver also was found in the car.

McDaniels was pronounced dead at Temple University Hospital at 7:56 p.m.

The officer, whose name was not released, has been placed on desk duty pending an Internal Affairs investigation - standard protocol in a police-involved shooting.

"I don't see how he had it in him," Vaughan said of his nephew. "He was a good dude. Always pleasant, always playful."

Vaughan said that neither he nor his family know Gordon, or how McDaniels ended up in a car with him.

It's unclear where Gordon and McDaniels were headed Tuesday when they encountered police, but with two loaded guns in the Buick, there's a good chance that someone was going to get hurt that night.

It ended up being McDaniels.

"My heart is heavy today. Very, very heavy," Ernie Ross, a street worker with the Youth Violence Reduction Partnership, said Wednesday.

Ross said he had tried desperately to keep McDaniels on the straight and narrow after the teen was assigned to the program, because he had been deemed most likely to kill or be killed.

McDaniels had recently gone on a job interview, Ross said, but didn't get the job. He had talked with his uncle, too, about learning how to do heating, ventilation and air-conditioning work.

"It's like losing one of your friends. I had him for over a year and he was a very pleasant young man. He was always smiling, well-mannered. He didn't come off as angry. . . . You hate to hear of a kid getting killed, especially by gun."

Ross said McDaniels' probation officer called him about 9 on Wednesday morning to tell him that McDaniels had been killed.

McDaniels was off house arrest, but still on probation.

"This is another reminder of why we need to get guns off our streets," police spokesman Lt. John Stanford said. "Both of them [McDaniels and Gordon] had [prior arrests], but they were able to get their hands on those weapons."

The fatal shooting took place a little more than a week after Officer Edward Davies was shot in the abdomen while struggling with a suspect in Feltonville. Davies lost a kidney and remains hospitalized.

"This is not about 'us versus them,' " Stanford said, noting that the easy availability of illegal firearms poses an equal threat to city residents and police officers.

Stanford said he's worked with at-risk youth. Many struggle to distance themselves from their neighborhoods and old friends, even when it's clear that each pose great danger.

"It's a fear of the unknown," he said. "And a lot of them don't understand that it's OK to want something different, to want something better for yourself, despite the peer pressure they may face."

Ross suspects McDaniels panicked when he was stopped by cops because he had two firearms and was still on probation.

He plans to talk with other kids about what happened to McDaniels. "I want them to understand," Ross said. "I want them to see they don't want to wind up like this."

Vaughan said he spoke with his nephew a few hours before he was killed. Just a typical conversation, with Vaughn reminding McDaniels to be safe, to call if he needed anything.

Vaughan lowered his head. Sighed. Recalled another piece of advice he often gave McDaniels:

"Three strikes. Three strikes and you're out."