High-minded new arrival gunned down at 23
UNDER THE COLUMN marked "favorite quotes" on 23-year-old Beau Zabel's Facebook page, it reads: "It's not what you are, it's what you don't become that hurts."
UNDER THE COLUMN marked "favorite quotes" on 23-year-old Beau Zabel's Facebook page, it reads: "It's not what you are, it's what you don't become that hurts."
Zabel had been working as a Starbucks barista since he moved here in May and had dreams of becoming a high-school math teacher. He had recently been accepted to the Philadelphia Teaching Fellows program and was to attend graduate school at Drexel University in the fall.
Zabel will never become the teacher he had hoped to be and it's going to hurt those whom he left behind the most.
Early yesterday, he was shot and killed a block from his home on Ellsworth Street near East Passyunk Avenue in South Philadelphia during an attempted robbery, police said.
As of last night, police had made no arrests.
Police said Zabel, described by friends and family as a positive and driven young man, was walking home from a late night of work at the Starbucks at 4th and South streets.
"I received a phone call from my mother this morning," said Natasha Newcomb, Zabel's stepsister, in a phone interview from Iowa City, Iowa.
"At first I thought, this isn't true. It's still on and off though," Newcomb said. "There are moments where I am completely fine and then others when I just burst into tears."
"I just can't imagine anyone wanting to hurt him. He was so sweet and so kindhearted. He wouldn't harm anyone or anything."
Zabel moved to Philadelphia after cultivating a strong desire to teach inner-city kids, according to Newcomb, 26.
"I don't know what it was exactly but Philadelphia was at the top of his list," Newcomb said, laughing. "That was the place that he wanted to teach."
Originally from Austin, Minn., Zabel had dreams of becoming an attorney, but after a summer studying Spanish in Ecuador, he knew he wanted to teach, his sister said.
"He loved it there [Ecuador]," said his father Doug Kammeier.
"He loved how beautiful it was there and how friendly the people were."
After the Ecuador trip, he finished his undergraduate degree in mathematics, philosophy and Spanish at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois.
He then started saving to move to Philadelphia and by the time he got here, he had just enough to settle in but needed an income to help pay rent, Kammeier said.
When he told his stepsister about his new job at Starbucks, "rocking the espresso machine and blending some fraps," as his Facebook page reads under the column job description, she laughed.
"Beau did not like coffee," Newcomb said matter-of-factly. "I thought it was great, I was really proud that he was working at Starbucks."
Yesterday, it was as if life had moved on in the South Philadelphia neighborhood that Zabel, a music lover who played the viola and sang in the choir in college, had called home for the past month and a half.
Kids played basketball in the streets oblivious to any evidence that was left over from the senseless blood that had been spilled less than 12 hours earlier.
"It's so surreal, it's like something you see in a movie," Kammeier said.
"Things like this don't happen to us, it's always someone else"
Newcomb just hopes that with her stepbrother's death, something good, maybe a foundation in his name, will come.
"It's about the person getting caught, obviously, but it's so much more than that," Newcomb said.
"Beau was in his very nature a giving person, he wasn't about himself at all, he was always about other people," Newcomb continued, her voice breaking.
"Because he's not going to be able carry out his dreams himself, then maybe we can do that for him," she said quietly crying.
Anyone with any information about yesterday's incident should call 215-686-TIPS. *
The Associated Press and staff writer Stephanie Farr contributed to this report.
