A 13-year-old playing with friends was ambushed in a drive-by shooting. Family remembers him as a sports-loving 8th grader
Family members of Amir Akers, a 13-year-old shot and killed Tuesday night in North Philly, reflect on his warm nature, loyalty, and hope for the future.
Amir Akers came bounding into his West Oak Lane home around 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday night. The 13-year-old asked his grandma for a dollar to buy some candy from the corner store and his grandpa for permission to head outside.
“‘Papa, I’m going to play basketball,’” Gregory Akers recalled his grandson telling him. “I said, ‘Come right back. Don’t stay late.’”
Soon 8 p.m. came and went.
Then 8:30 p.m. passed.
So did 9 p.m.
Amir still hadn’t returned home.
“He should have been back,” Akers thought to himself.
He clicked on the 10 p.m. newscast and saw that two teens had been shot on North 19th Street.
North 19th Street — where Amir liked to play basketball.
He raced down to the makeshift court abutting a graveyard. The area was cordoned off with police tape.
His grandson was dead.
Amir and about 10 other kids had been running up and down the block that night playing with toy guns that shoot gel-like water beads, said Deputy Police Commissioner Frank Vanore.
The kids were chasing each other down the street, laughing, screaming, and joking with one another, he said, when suddenly, at about 8:45 p.m., a silver SUV pulled up on the corner, and at least two gunmen jumped out and started shooting at the kids with real bullets.
Amir was shot in the back and shoulder. A 14-year-old boy, Amir’s friend, was shot in each leg, according to police. Both were taken to the hospital, where Amir died at 9:20 p.m.
No arrests have been made, and the motive behind the shooting remains under investigation, Vanore said.
“We’re looking for more video and anyone who knows anything,” he said. “It’s truly frightening and horrific. ... They were just out there playing and got fired upon.”
It was the end of the life of a young boy just emerging into adolescence. He was set to graduate from General Louis Wagner Middle School in June and start high school in the fall. The eighth grader liked to boast about his rapidly climbing stature — he was around 5′7″ — and relished showing off his incoming peach fuzz, his family members said.
“Do you see? Do you see? Do you see?” Amir would ask his grandmother, Wanda Harper, as he pointed above his upper lip, she recalled.
Around the house, Amir was known for his exceptionally warm hugs, teenage bravado and devotion to his family, his grandparents said. At school he was known as a popular kid and for his love of sports, said Wagner principal Connie Grier. Basketball and football were his favorites.
He filled the home with sound, his grandfather said, thinking back on the music Amir blasted through the house and his rollicking laugher as he enjoyed a game.
“It’s too quiet,” Akers said around 2 p.m. the day after the shooting.
Inside the family’s West Oak Lane home, Amir’s 15-year-old sister London, and aunts, uncles, and a scruffy yorkie mix named Milo sat listlessly in recliner couches around the living room and quietly stared at the table.
The only sound came from a television, still switched to the local news, propped up on a wooden table. Above it hung a framed photo of a younger Amir and London smiling and facing back to back.
At around 2:15 p.m. Akers’ phone rang. It was Gift of Life, the organ donation group, inquiring about Amir’s remains, he said. Akers and Harper looked at each other and agreed, the answer was no. They had so little control over their grandson’s fate, but they had control over this.
As quiet returned to the living room, Amir’s uncle, Khalil Akers, opened the front door, his eyes wide and watery.
“He had much more to see and do,” Khalil Akers said of his nephew, who he loved like a son. “He was a baby, a child. We shouldn’t have to feel this pain right now.”
Sitting in the corner of the couch in a hot pink hoodie and bedazzled jeans, London Akers could conjure only one thought about her only sibling that afternoon.
“He was always there for me,” she said before turning into a cushion and breaking down.
Staff writer Kristen Graham contributed to this article.