Slaying of beauty pageant finalist is another sign of how out of control gun violence is | Jenice Armstrong

The homicides happen so fast and often that it’s hard to keep up.

An 11-year-old boy fatally wounded while riding a scooter Friday. A 21-year-old man shot and killed Monday during a fight at the Philadelphia Mills mall. A 24-year-old beauty pageant finalist gunned down outside her parents’ house.

That last homicide didn’t attract a lot of media attention when it happened March 12.

But when I learned about it, it stopped me because her death really should have been front-page news. Najeebat Sule had just gotten her master’s degree in public health at West Chester University and was looking forward to earning a doctorate. She was a young woman with big dreams who didn’t mind doing the hard work to make them come true. Why would someone kill her?

Sule had been at a girlfriend’s house March 11, eating onion rings, french fries, and wings and watching Netflix. When it got late, the friend, 24-year-old Habibat Magaji, urged her to stay over, which she did. The next morning, Sule took her gray Toyota Corolla in for repairs. Afterward, she headed to her parents’ home in Holmesburg, trading texts with Magaji along the way.

As Sule sat in her car outside her parents’ house in the 8800 block of Frankford Avenue at 5:54 p.m., a gunman approached and shot her multiple times. Authorities rushed her to Jefferson Torresdale Hospital, where she was pronounced dead at 6:27. No arrests have been made.

Her terrified parents have moved and are staying at an undisclosed location. They are devastated. Her dad had been in the living room when shots rang out.

“When I heard the gunshots, I came out,” Adewale Sule, told me. “I saw the guy shooting my daughter. He shot the last round and I pursued him. … He ran back to his car.”

Magaji, who met Sule at a masjid, said the two had been texting back and forth about photos they took after their sleepover when she suddenly stopped responding.

“I got a call that something had happened and I was, like, ‘No there has been a mistake.’ I’m waiting for her to reply to my text. She literally had texted me at 5:30,” Magaji told me.

“I can’t think of anything that would make anyone want to kill her,” she added.

“Najee,” as she was called, loved fashion and shopping and traveling to places like Puerto Rico and Nashville, where she had recently visited a pageant friend.

“Our joke was that she was like a Nigerian princess,” said Tamira DeSeignoria, 24, who met her at Abraham Lincoln High School when they were both students. “Whatever Najee wanted, Najee got. When you walked in her room, it was pink everywhere. One week her sheets were diva print. Another week it was glitter. It was just a room that any feminine female would want. Her room was just like how her personality was.”

Officials with the Miss Nigeria International pageant announced Sule’s death on their Facebook page March 19, writing: “In spite of the highly competitive nature of beauty pageants, Queen Najeebat took it all in stride and easily made friends with all the other girls and fostered an environment where most of the girls became like sisters. Although she was the second runner up in the contest, she was genuinely happy for the girl that emerged as the winner and cheered her on as though she was her own sister. …”

Shortly before she was killed, Sule reached out to her mother.

“She called me, like, 4:05 p.m. ‘Mommy, what time will you be home?’ I told her … 5:30 because I left work at 5,” Tawakalitu Sule said, adding: “All of my children have been crying every day because of their big sister. They really miss her. I miss my daughter.”

Sule had two younger siblings.

“She was a part of the Nigerian Muslim community,” said Fatia Kasumu, a Houston-based multimedia specialist and one of Sule’s friends. “Because this happened to a Nigerian youth, everyone is shocked. Everyone is, like, ‘How? This doesn’t happen to us.’”

Had she lived, Sule would have made her life into something really special — something her family would have been proud of and something her adopted city and country would have been proud of, too.

But we’ll never know what could have been because a depraved gunman snuffed out her life. This has got to stop. Homicides are up 28% in Philadelphia. As of this writing, we are only 89 days into the year but there have been 119 fatal shootings.

Something radical needs to happen. We can’t continue acting as if it’s business as usual with so many being shot like this. Too many of our young kings and queens like Sule are being lost.