As cops close in on her killer, family mourns Nicetown teen

ANITA COTTON snapped a selfie just before 3 p.m. Saturday, wearing an American-flag shawl and a smile.

"Happy 4 of July," she tweeted with the photo.

Normally, such a snapshot would be nothing more than a silly memory posted online by a 17-year-old heading to college in the fall.

Instead, it's become a memorial image of the young mother, retweeted nearly 200 times by her friends and family.

Twelve hours after the shutter on her smartphone closed, police say, Cotton was stabbed to death in a neighborhood spat that reached catastrophic proportions.

"She was a very good person; she was not a fighter," her grandmother Anita Anderson said Monday night at a vigil for the slain teen.

"She loved everyone, and she smiled every day."

Lit by the glow of flickering candles, more than 100 people mourned the Nicetown teen in the parking lot of the Walgreens at Broad Street and Hunting Park Avenue, the scene of her murder.

They wept for her 2-year-old daughter, London, for whom Cotton had put her education at Northeast High on hold.

They glowed with pride at Cotton's resilience: She had returned to the school, finishing her senior year just a few weeks ago.

Cotton - "Neet Neet" to her friends - was researching colleges, and was considering Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where two of her cousins, Taje and Jasmine, are students.

Lucille Bethel, her paternal grandmother, said that Cotton, a practicing Muslim, was "getting her life in order" when she was cut down.

"Whoever did this, they should be ashamed of themselves," Bethel said. "She was still a kid."

A scuffle on South St.

Cotton and her friends had rung in Independence Day at Penn's Landing, watching the fireworks explode over the Delaware River, relatives said.

The night turned sour on South Street, where a group of teenage girls from the same section of Nicetown picked a fight with the girls, police said. What they were warring over remained unclear Monday night, but police said it was rooted in an ongoing dispute from that North Philly neighborhood.

Patrol officers nearby broke up the scuffle, which involved about 15 to 20 girls, and both groups headed home on SEPTA's Broad Street Line, police said.

After emerging from the subway, the combatants reunited in the parking lot of the nearby Walgreens, about five blocks from Cotton's front door.

There the fight resumed, with Cotton and an unidentified girl squaring off, Homicide Unit Captain James Clark said.

Surveillance footage shows the young women grappling, clawing at each other's hair and face, Clark said. At one point, the video shows the unidentified girl thrusting a sharp object upward into Cotton's neck. She jerks backward, her hand clutching the wound, takes a few steps and collapses.

Officers passing by saw the crowd of teens and ran to the scene, police said. They found Cotton lying on the lot's pavement in a pool of her own blood.

The cops took her to Einstein Medical Center, where she was pronounced dead just before 4 a.m.

On Monday, Clark said detectives were closing in on the girls involved in the slaying, thanks to clear surveillance footage from both the initial fight on South Street and the fatal stabbing outside Walgreens.

His message to the girl who wielded the knife was blunt but simple:

"We're going to know who you are very shortly," Clark said. "It's in your best interest to get with a loved one or a parent, come into the Homicide Unit and tell your side of story."

The same asphalt

Cotton's loved ones told stories of their own Monday night on the same asphalt where she spent her last moments.

They released balloons and embraced, lamenting the violence that claimed her life.

Lydine Dutton, who lives a few doors from Cotton's family on Bristol Street, watched the 17-year-old grow up.

She last saw her Friday. They hugged and had a brief chat about the upcoming holiday.

Two days later, arriving home from church, Dutton received the grim news that her young neighbor was slain.

"It's foolishness . . . What happened to her, I wouldn't wish that on anyone. Fighting is one thing, but killing is something else," Dutton said.

"These kids today, they want to shoot and stab each other. But why? Life is beautiful. It's humans who make a mess of it."