Her nephew was killed on Halloween in 2022. A teen shooter’s guilty plea brought some answers — but not enough.
Aaron Coles admitted that when he was 17, he shot and killed Jabarr Richards near 53rd and Greenway in October 2022.
Tanya Clark’s knees bounced as she sat in the courtroom, her eyes darting toward the doors. For nearly four years, she’d waited for this moment — for the person who killed the nephew she’d raised like a son to admit to what he’d done.
But as Aaron Coles, 21, took a seat next to his lawyer and prepared to plead guilty to killing Jabarr Richards, 20, in Southwest Philadelphia in 2022, Clark had to leave the room.
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How, she said she thought, could this be the person that ruined my life?
“I went in with anger and hatred,” she said. “And then you see this child.”
Coles on Monday pleaded guilty to third-degree murder, conspiracy, and gun crimes, admitting that when he was 17, he and two others shot Richards nine times at 53rd Street and Greenway Avenue on Halloween night.
For nearly 18 months, Richards’ killing — one of more than 500 homicides in 2022 amid an unprecedented spike in violence — went unsolved. Clark and her family agonized over the possibility of becoming one of the hundreds of families in the city who might never get to face their loved one’s killer in court.
But Assistant District Attorney Anthony Voci said Homicide Detective Joseph Cremen had persistently worked the case, amassing evidence that ultimately showed Coles was involved.
Voci said Coles’ cousin had been killed several months earlier, and that his crew from the Bartram Village projects blamed young men from 53rd and Greenway. The lawyer said there’s no evidence to suggest that Richards was involved with that earlier homicide, and believes he was targeted simply because he was from the area.
At the time of the shooting, he said, Coles was wearing a GPS ankle monitor for an earlier illegal gun possession arrest, and had placed aluminum foil around the monitor to try to obscure his location.
But even through the foil, Voci said, the monitor communicates with cellphone towers, which showed Coles near 53rd and Greenway at the time of the shooting. Coles’ Instagram messages also referenced the shooting, he said, and included a photo of a firearm that appeared to resemble one of the Smith and Wesson guns used to kill Richards.
Coles was arrested and charged in June 2024.
In the courtroom on Monday, Coles’ mother bounced her knee anxiously and wiped away tears as her son repeated that he was guilty.
He’s scheduled to be sentenced in August.
In the hallway, Clark, alongside her daughter and Richards’ older brother, David, tried to find some comfort in the fact that they wouldn’t have to sit through a lengthy trial.
“One step over the hill, toward healing,” Clark said.
She thanked Cremen, the detective, who told her he was still working to identify the two other gunmen.
Clark nodded and believed him.
Back at her West Philadelphia home that afternoon, Clark sat with the morning’s hearing still running through her mind. She just kept thinking about Coles.
“This boy was lost and caught up in a world that was too fast for him,” she said. “What hurt so bad that you had to take my child? Why my child?”
Her child — the goofy one who’d survived his own painful childhood with absent parents, who played basketball and pestered his older siblings but would have done anything for them.
Her voice cracked and faded as she repeated: “I just wanna know. I just wanna know. I just wanna know.”
