EVERY HOMICIDE is a tragedy and a crime against nature.
And every homicide victim has a story. Some of those stories are part of grim statistics of too many guns and drugs, too much poverty and crime and violence at home.
Some are horror stories of children being killed by neglect or intent by boyfriends or parents.
We are almost numb to these stories because they have become the weekly recap of deadly weekends, as we nervously track the city's murder numbers and compare them with the previous year's.
Other stories are more shocking, outrages to lawful society, like the killing of Philadelphia police Officer Charles Cassidy and Sgt. Stephen Liczbinski.
And other stories - of stolen hope and innocence, of the tragic intersection of chance and geography, randomness and chaos - belong to a smaller group, like Rhashe Allen, 22, a college student killed in November; Sean Patrick Conroy, a young man killed in a SEPTA station in April, and Aly Elkaied, a store owner killed in a burglary in early June.
And now, Beau Zabel joins that group. The 23- year-old who had moved to the city from Minnesota to teach in the Philadelphia schools was shot on his way home from his job at Starbucks in South Philadelphia. He was the victim of an attempted robbery, and police speculate that he may have been shot for his iPod.
His killing has robbed the city of far more.
Zabel represented the kind of young person we need more of in the world, and in particular, the kind of young person the city has been trying to attract: the ones who flock to cities around the country for excitement, opportunities and challenges that can't be found in the hinterlands. The story we tell ourselves - that Philadelphia is now the cool city where young people want to live -is true, but it may also be a way of forgetting that all cities, ours included, are far more complex than cool, and are filled with problems and challenges that will take more than an administration to turn around.
The grief that Beau Zabel's story engenders is that this young man - who wanted to teach the city's children - would have helped with the turnaround.
We hope that his death does not discourage other energetic young people from coming to teach in Philadelphia- or their families from sending them.
We need more of them to help us turn the tide away from the violence which claimed him. *
