Friends, family remember aspiring poet killed in North Phila. hit-and-run

The brochure from the University of Pittsburgh that arrived in the mail Thursday was like so many that had turned up at Tyrone Tillman's house this summer - bedecked with photos of lush quads and science labs and beaming undergraduates.

When Tillman saw it, he broke down in tears.

The brochure was meant for his son, T-Jay - 17 years old, a fullback on his high school football team, a budding poet with notebooks full of rhymes in his bedroom. Had he been at home to receive it, he likely would have read it with excitement. He was starting his senior year in the fall, starting to think about all that was ahead of him.

He was killed in a hit-and-run accident Sunday afternoon while riding his bicycle not far from home. Police would tell his father a driver hit him, stopped her car to look at the stricken boy, and sped off after a passenger in her car told her to leave.

Two people in another car wrote down the woman's license plate number, called 911, and followed her until police arrived. Two more stayed with T-Jay as he lay dying in the street.

That is what has stayed with Tyrone Tillman in the long nights since his son was killed. He refers to T-Jay in the present tense, recounts happy memories with a smile. But he cries when he thinks of the strangers who comforted his son in his last minutes.

"I had thought he was just out there on the street by himself," he said at his Harrowgate home Thursday afternoon. "I hope that I could be that strong for someone else."

Tillman calls himself his son's No. 1 fan. For years, he has saved T-Jay's handwritten poems and dented football helmets and the certificates and ribbons from school oratory contests and poetry slams.

T-Jay had been playing football since he was 8 and writing poems and raps since he was 12. There's a grainy video of him in his father's kitchen, his voice still little-boy high, rapping about "harmonies and melodies" in relationships.

"He was 12," Tillman said, laughing. "Rapping about being in love. What did he know about relationships?"

But Tillman knew his son had already been through more than most. T-Jay, whose given name also was Tyrone, saw his mother go to prison when he was just 5. And he was briefly in the care of the Department of Human Services before Tillman was given custody of him.

"He had seen so much hurt at a young age," Tillman said.

For a time, T-Jay struggled himself. He served a stint in juvenile detention at 14 for snatching a woman's cellphone on the Market-Frankford El, and was kicked out of two high schools.

But he found a niche at Thomas Edison High School.

In a video taken at the school's poetry slam this March, he walks on stage, pulls up a poem called "Dear Mom" on his cellphone, and begins to read - stumbling a few times, but pushing through with confidence.

"I'm a man who's too deep in his own emotions," he starts.

"You put pressure on me, Mom," he says midway through his performance, "so I put it in rap."

T-Jay had joined the school's poetry slam team, which competes with other schools across the city as part of the Philadelphia Youth Poetry Movement, at the beginning of the last school year.

He was one of the first in the school to sign up. Then he started to persuade his friends to join.

"It's really cool to express myself," Nahja Martinez, 17, recalled his telling her. She and two other teammates gathered Thursday night at their coach's house in North Philadelphia to share memories of their friend.

He was motivated, they said. Stubborn. Full of energy.

He worked as hard at his poetry, his coach, Freda Anderson, said, as he did at holding the group together. He came up with a motivating chant for the group: "Who got your back? I got your back!"

When his team, against all odds, made it to the citywide poetry slam finals last year but was eliminated in the first round, he cried. The team surrounded him, chanting: "Who got your back? I got your back!"

One of the last poems he performed, Anderson said, was about teenagers who die too young - about the violence that he and so many of his classmates have faced. He called the dead "divine kings after dust."

In the wee hours of Sunday morning, T-Jay had called home to say he would be spending the night with a friend.

Tillman, a Greyhound bus driver, was working in Richmond, Va., and came back that night to find no sign of T-Jay. He and his wife, Lakeya, thought he had decided to stay another night with his friend. They planned to reprimand him when he came home.

By Monday morning, T-Jay had not returned. Tillman dialed his number again and again. It kept going straight to voice mail. Perhaps, he hoped, his son had just forgotten to charge his phone.

At 8 that night, a police officer knocked on the door. He asked Tillman to sit down. He pulled out a photo of T-Jay - in his confusion, Tillman thought it was a wanted poster.

"That's my son," he told the officer.

Everything from there seemed to move in slow motion.

"He's dead," the officer said, and apologized.

Tillman banged the table. Punched the walls. T-Jay's three younger sisters heard their father yelling in grief and ran downstairs.

T-Jay had no identification on him when he died. The police had asked the local news for help finding his family, but described him as a man in his 20s. Tillman had thought nothing of the news report when he heard it. His son was just a kid.

On Wednesday night, the Tillmans went to the spot where their son had died - the 4000 block of North Second Street, just down the street from his high school. Tyrone Tillman was struck by how dark it was, and how fast the cars went.

The driver in T-Jay's case was taken into custody and later released, and has not been charged. The District Attorney's Office said it is still investigating the case.

In the meantime, college brochures keep arriving at the Tillman house. They likely will for some time.

T-Jay had been looking forward to the year ahead - he was excited about the football season, excited to start thinking about college, his father said. He had his eye on Lehigh University, where he could play football, study business, maybe learn how to market the rap lyrics he was scribbling in his notebooks.

"I wanted his dreams to become reality," Tillman said.

The kids on the poetry slam team heard the news Tuesday night, before T-Jay had been publicly identified as the victim in the hit-and-run. They saw a photo of his pink-and-black backpack on the news, and they knew.

They got together later that day. Cried, screamed, held each other. Broke a few things, they said, sheepishly.

"We all made a promise," said Brandon Melendez, 17. "Stay together no matter what."

T-Jay is with them now, they say. They say they will compete next season in his honor. They say he will carry them through.

215-854-2961 @aubreyjwhelan