Neighborhood haven is shattered by gunfire, death

Block captain Shauynice Gaskins was sitting on her porch steps at 6:05 p.m., watching a basketball game not three minutes underway, when gunshots turned cheers into screams.

"Hundreds of people came stampeding out from the bleachers and everywhere," she said yesterday.

Gaskins, 34, ran against the tide fleeing the Athletic Recreation Center at 26th and Jefferson Streets in North Philadelphia, seeking two of her daughters, who she feared were courtside spectators. They were not.

But there, she found 17-year-old Jamile Collins, next to a playground slide, his shirt matted with blood.

There, she watched him die.

Yesterday, the horror of another youth gunned down - police say Collins was shot by a young man from a rival group - was coupled with the uncertainty that a beloved neighborhood institution might never again seem the same.

Police, worried that violence might break out at a center-sponsored basketball tournament, said they had undercover officers in the crowd and were quickly able to contain the violence, which left three others wounded, including the 22-year-old man believed to be the shooter.

For a half-century, the center - built on the grounds where the Philadelphia Athletics played their first games in the 1880s - was the neighborhood's haven.

Generations of toddlers played there. Football players practiced there. Classes in music and the arts were offered there.

"That recreation center is a big part of this community," Gaskins said. "There's a boxing ring where they teach you stuff, and they take all kinds of trips. There's the swimming pool."

Collie Williams, 64, was babysitting his 1-year-old nephew yesterday at the center. But even as the wind sighed through the buttonwood trees, something was amiss, he said: For the first time, he felt fear in the working-class community, where block captains made daily broom sweeps of the sidewalks.

As Williams watched his nephew Sabir play on a gym set, he declared: "I won't bring him in the evenings now. I'm scared now . . . If I see a gang of boys walking through here now, I have to leave. I wasn't afraid like this before. I felt safe over here."

Fred Jenkins, 51, has been involved with the center, which is just outside Brewerytown, since he was 10 years old, first as a participant and now as an assistant supervisor at the city-operated facility.

"This has been the safest place in the neighborhood. People came from all over the city for our sliding boards, boxing and after-school," he said as he unlocked the center yesterday morning.

He opened a little later than usual, he said, not because of Wednesday's mayhem but because the center's summer day-care program had ended last Friday. Pool hours were winding down as well, and the pool will close tomorrow.

"There's a battle going on all across Philadelphia," he said. "There's people trying to do right things getting caught up with people doing things wrong. They mingle, and it spins out of the moment."

He vowed that the basketball games would continue until their scheduled five-week run expire next week.

Anthony Sharpe, who has volunteered at the center ever since he was released four years ago from prison on gun charges, said he had urged police to monitor the basketball tournament.

"I had been incarcerated for the same nonsense," he said of the shootings.

Police made a more visible presence yesterday, with 23d District Capt. Dennis Wilson maintaining that undercover police - he wouldn't say how many - had mingled among Wednesday's crowd. In hindsight, he acknowledged, a uniformed presence might have been a better deterrent.

Like Jenkins and Sharpe, Wilson promised that the shooting would not curtail center activities, a comment echoed by Lt. Thomas Hyers, who visited the center with him.

"We don't want to see it end," Hyers said.

Hyers made his first visit inside the center yesterday and came away impressed.

"I got a whole different perspective walking through here," he said after viewing old newspaper clippings, posters and pictures on the walls of the center's well-equipped gym.

Meanwhile, block captain Gaskins was sweeping in front of her house and unable to shake the sight of Collins' death.

"He had brown skin, a moustache and was wearing blue-suede New Balance sneakers. He was gasping for air."

She said his eyes rolled up in his head and he stopped breathing.

And then she posed the question that has been asked over and over again in Philadelphia.

"Why are all our kids dying? The [police] commissioner and D.A. say they have the answers, but our kids are still dying . . . Somehow, somewhere, these kids are getting these guns."