Police: 19-year-old shot boyhood friend over a PlayStation

AFTER MALIK Anderson shot his childhood friend execution-style Aug. 19 over a PlayStation 3, police sources say, he knew just where to hide the gun - an Eggo waffles box in the freezer.

The 19-year-old's alleged crime caught up with him before breakfast yesterday when homicide detectives and a SWAT team burst into his family's Northeast Philly house, on Tomlinson Road near Clark Street, about 5 a.m., and arrested him in the slaying of Daquan Crump, also 19. Investigators said the pair had been friends since middle school.

The trouble started after the pals conspired to steal a PlayStation 3 video-game console from another friend, Homicide Capt. James Clark said yesterday. Crump allegedly carried out the plot on his own, swiping the PlayStation and selling it on the street for $60.

When Anderson found out he'd been cut out of the deal, investigators said, he decided to kill his friend. Armed with a grudge and a .22-caliber Ruger pistol, Anderson lured Crump to a desolate construction site on Northeast Avenue near Serota Place, in Bustleton, waited until Crump wasn't looking and fired a bullet into the back of Crump's head, police said.

Anderson then stood over his friend's body and pumped several more shots into him, police said.

"He didn't know what hit him," Clark said yesterday after Anderson was charged with the slaying. "[Anderson] stood over top of his longtime friend and fired nine more times, shooting him in the head and killing him."

Crump had no criminal record and had started a job at the Wendy's restaurant on Red Lion Road near Haldeman Avenue - a few blocks from where he lived in an apartment with his mother - two weeks before he died, police said. Anderson had arrests for "very minor" offenses, Clark said.

The night before the slaying, the teenagers had been hanging out watching TV and playing video games at a house in the neighborhood with a group of other childhood friends, Clark said.

"This is very sad," Clark said. "I have two teenage sons at home, and I tell them all the time, be very careful who you call friends."

Yesterday afternoon, a man who answered the door of the well-kept twin house in Bustleton where Anderson lived with his family said, "We have nothing to say," and shut the door.

Neither Crump's mother nor his grandmother answered calls from the Daily News yesterday, but his mother said last week that her son was a bright, funny and energetic young man.

"He was just very, very caring," Sherron Kaba said through tears the day of her son's death. "He was a good kid, and we miss him."

Crump played on the varsity basketball team when he was a junior at George Washington High, graduated in 2012 and planned to go to college to study business, Kaba said.

Crump's Facebook page, where he called himself "Quan Crump," is a haunting reminder of a young life cut down decades too early.

"12th grade now I made it one more year and I can see my family holding those congratulations balloons . . . 2012," the teen wrote on Facebook in June 2011.

Police believe Anderson acted alone in killing Crump, and Clark said the accused murderer went quietly when he was arrested and was cooperating with detectives yesterday. The gun had been recovered days earlier when police served a search warrant on the house.

The veteran homicide captain said the triviality of what led Anderson to allegedly slay his boyhood friend made Crump's murder a particularly heinous one in a city that regularly sees more than 300 homicides per year.

"In their minds, this is worth a human life," Clark said. "Because I didn't get a cut of a $60 profit from a used PlayStation game, I'm gonna . . . shoot a kid that I've been friends with since I was 10 or 11 years old."

- Staff writer Solomon Leach

contributed to this report.