Philly pro boxer, whose life had been marked by tragedy, killed in Delaware shooting

A Philadelphia boxing standout, who overcame tragedy in his early life to build a decadelong professional career in the ring, was fatally shot Friday in Wilmington, Del.

Police say Samuel “Tsunami” Teah, 36, died at an area hospital from injuries sustained in the incident, which occurred just before 2 p.m. on the 1100 block of Read Street.

Investigators declined to comment Saturday on the circumstances behind the shooting, except to say that no charges have been filed in the investigation.

Teah’s family said Saturday he’d been visiting the mother of his child before he was due back in Philadelphia for a scheduled shift in his job as a SEPTA bus driver when an altercation broke out with another man and he was killed.

“I lost a brother, a fighter, a friend, a whatever you could think of,” his trainer, Rashiem Jefferson, said in an Instagram post Friday evening. “This was a huge hurt piece.”

Jefferson met Teah 15 years ago during 7 a.m. workouts at the same Northern Liberties boxing gym and went on to coach the super lightweight class fighter throughout his professional career. He described him in an interview Saturday as a “strong fighter” who could “take a punch as good as he could give one.”

“Sam had a body like an action figure,” the trainer said. “He was never out of shape.”

Social media remembrances from others in Philadelphia’s tight-knit boxing community credited Teah as much for his fighting ability as for his unrelenting positivity given the tragic circumstances of his younger years.

Born in Monrovia, Liberia, he fled his native country with his family at the age of 6 — part of the diaspora of Liberians seeking asylum from back-to-back civil wars that plagued the West African nation through the ‘90s and early 2000s.

They settled in New York City and eventually Philadelphia, where the U.S. government repopulated many of the refugees from those conflicts.

“You never forget that, never,” Teah told boxing magazine the Ring in a 2017 interview. “Some people don’t remember things when they’re that young but I did. … When the rebels came around, they captured young kids and put AK-47s in their hands. That could have been me.”

Instead, Teah said, he found boxing — a sport he discovered at 19.

“Kids made fun of my accent when I arrived in New York,” he said. “I used to get into a lot of fights. Boxing came naturally to me.”

His father, however, had reservations. In an interview Saturday, Alfred Teah, 61, said the only thing his family knew about boxing at the time was Muhammad Ali and the sport’s reputation for the punishing toll it took on the bodies of those who pursued it long-term as a career.

“It wasn’t something I encouraged him to do, but he wouldn’t listen to me,” the elder Teah said. “But you know, he was good. I started following him. He was knocking people out. So, I let him go do what he wants.”

But in 2008, tragedy struck the Teahs again.

Most of his family — including his brother, two sisters, two nephews, a niece, and a close family friend — died in a fire the day after Christmas at a gathering at his mother’s Southwest Philadelphia rowhouse.

Teah, 23 at the time, had argued with his mother that morning and made a last-minute decision while on his way there not to attend the event. He later learned about their deaths from TV news.

“It’s been very hard,” he told the Daily News in 2009. “You can only look at the agony of it all now.”

He wore monogrammed trunks throughout his boxing career with the date 12/26/08 in remembrance.

“I dedicate every fight to my family,” he told the Ring in 2017.

Teah’s first professional fight came in 2013 — a bout he won over lightweight Larry Yanez in a three-round technical knockout.

He earned acclaim over the next decade through several notable victories, including what would become the last of his career — an upset victory over welterweight Enriko Gogokhia in March.

After a subsequent loss in May — an eighth-round knockout against Andrew Rodgers in Newtown — Teah and his manager, Sarah Fina, said they were working toward his return to the ring in early 2024.

“You were one of the solid few,” Fina said of Teah’s death in an Instagram post Friday. “You gave me a hard time, but I knew the love was real. My pain in the ass. But like the pain you feel after a long work out on the next day. The good pain. The pain of growth.”

But despite that goal, Teah continued to work at side jobs, including as a SEPTA driver and manager of his own small car leasing company, as he’d done throughout his boxing career.

“Sam was a hard-working man,” his father said. “Very humble, but you know as a boxer he’s not one to be taken for granted. He’s not a weak person.”

He said his family is now trying to summon some of that strength after another holiday marked by misfortune.

“Every Christmas that comes, it’s hard, because of the fire,” Alfred Teah said. “Now, right after Thanksgiving Day, too.”