Slain "role model" Miles Mack mourned

Miles Mack was gunned down at a basketball tournament that he'd founded to save and serve a community he once referred to as "my people."

In that quick and brutal act, a city starved for role models lost one of its best.

And a good man who had stepped up to make a difference was apparently victimized by the same tough guys and "hard-headed" kids he had worked all his life to help.

"He was on the front lines," said Rick Young, a friend and the chief executive officer of the Mantua Community Improvement Committee. "He loved basketball and that's the way to reach out to teens in urban neighborhoods.

"A community like Mantua needs all the role models it can get."

Police say Mack, 42, the father of two sons aged 22 and 20, was not the intended target.

But that makes little difference to people like Wendell "Cadillac" Zellars, 43, Mack's closest friend since kindergarten.

"He meant more to me than my real brothers," said Zellars, who had to absorb the shock of seeing Mack's body lying on the basketball courts at McAlpin Playground immediately after the shooting.

"He's my family, and now a big part of me is gone. There's a blank now. You look for his smile and it's not there anymore. There's just a blank."

Mack - named by his mother after the jazz great Miles Davis - founded his beloved X-Tra Miles Developmental Basketball League to "keep kids straight," said Zellars, a general contractor.

"He loved the kids in the community," said Mack's mother, Sandra, 63.

"He always wanted [to help] the tough kids, the hard-headed kids," said Murphy Appin, 44, who worked with Mack on the league. "He could get in anybody's heart. That was his thing, to get the tough kids."

A quote from Mack on the X-Tra Web site reads, "I just want to know where the babies are."

That abiding concern for children in West Philadelphia was Mack's passion and legacy, friends and family said.

"He was genuine, and always all about the kids," said Kendall Edwards, 42, Mack's cousin. "And kids always followed him, no matter what."

His natural charisma was evident at a young age.

When Mack was a teenager, he was known as the peacemaker in the neighborhood.

"If a fight broke out," Zellars said, "he would tell the guys, 'We're friends. We don't fight.' "

Even older kids listened to Mack, who had a calming way about him. "He would never get angry, never get upset," Zellars said. "He really knew how to talk to people."

Zellars and Mack were known as dual class clowns in Belmont Elementary School, and they grew up laughing and seeing silliness in everyday things.

They loved playing basketball, and Zellars said he was Mack's "wing man," someone the fast and athletic Mack could count on as they took on West Philly's toughest players.

"We did everything together," Zellars recalled. "Even as adults, we spoke on the phone every day."

When they were young men, the two would hang out at neighborhood bars to meet young women and listen to Motown, jazz and rap, Zellars said.

Mack developed a nearly encyclopedic knowledge of sports, and was often the arbiter of friends' debates about particular sporting events or athletes.

But he could also be relied on for wise counsel in serious matters; Mack would offer advice whenever Zellars would have disagreements with his wife.

"He would talk it out with me, tell me this, tell me that," Zellars said.

For the last 16 years, Mack worked at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, helping move patients in wheelchairs and stretchers, said Aron Berman, manager of the patient transportation department.

"This was a tremendous loss," Berman said. "He was an excellent, upbeat guy."

Young, of the Mantua Improvement Committee, agreed, and hoped that something good might come of tragedy.

"Maybe this loss will inspire another role model in the community to stand up," he said. "The race is never won until the baton is passed."