9912240097
DETROIT FREE PRESS
991224
Friday, December 24, 1999
METRO FINAL
1B
Photo J. KYLE KEENER/Detroit Free Press
Annette Towns did everything right to protect her and raise her youngest son,
Darryl, who was a promising athlete at Detroit Cody.
The family of Darryl Towns visits his grave, a five-minute drive from their
home. Paying their holiday respects are his brother Kevin Scott, 25; his
mother Annette Towns, 46; and his sister, Monique Towns, 21.
MITCH ALBOM
MITCH ALBOM'S DREAMS DEFERRED '99; FIRST IN A SERIES
Copyright (c) 1999, Detroit Free Press
AN ARGUMENT. A GUN. AND ANNETTE TOWNS LOSES HER 15-YEAR-OLD SON FOR NO REASON
The first thing Darryl Towns did, after he was shot, was stagger toward his
mother's bedroom. She wasn't home. He knew that. But bleeding from the chest,
the life oozing out of him, he retreated to the safest place he could think
of: Mama's room.
He had always been his mother's son. How many times, as a little boy, had he
tiptoed down this same short hallway, curled up at the foot of her bed, and
watched TV with the volume low until she woke up?
Now he came to her doorway with two bullet holes in his body. It was the
middle of another evening in the middle of another week and he had been shot.
Over what? Over nothing important. That's how it works in the city. He grabbed
his mother's cordless phone and stumbled back down the hallway.
Darryl's strength was ebbing now, and he wobbled near the stove, knocking it
forward as he tried to stay upright. He fell, dropped the phone, and went face
down. The floor began to moisten red.
Darryl's been shot! Darryl's been shot!
Neighbors quickly gathered outside. Darryl's friend Ronald Stewart -- Ron-Ron,
they called him -- came pushing through the side door. He saw Darryl on the
kitchen floor, heard him mumbling, and dragged him out to the driveway.
"You're gonna be OK . . ." Ron-Ron said, panting, "you're gonna be OK." But
police cars were coming and women were crying and Darryl Ray Towns Jr., a
15-year-old who had never done a criminal thing in his life, was not going to
be OK. In a few more minutes, he was not going to be alive.
This is your son, Detroit. This is the kid you want to raise. A good kid. A
trouble-free kid. A kid who went to school, listened to his mother, was
embraced by his neighborhood, played wide receiver on Cody's junior varsity
football team, and loved basketball so much he took catechism classes so that
he could continue to play in a nearby Catholic church league, backing his
6-foot-3 frame into the lane, turning, shooting, hearing the crowd cheer.
This is the kid who makes you say, "Man, if they could all be like that one,
the city would be a better place."
He was that one.
He's still dead.
'His body was still warm'
Annette Towns, 46, sits at her kitchen table, holding a picture of her son in
his basketball uniform. On the evening of Sept. 9, she was working her usual
shift as a secretary at Sinai-Grace Hospital when someone said, "Annette,
there's an emergency phone call...."
Next thing she knew she was racing her car through the north side of Detroit,
the string of small houses blurring past her windows. She turned down her
street and saw flashing police lights. Crowds of neighbors.
A woman named Teresa grabbed her first. "I tried to do CPR, Annette! There was
too much damage, too much internal bleeding...."
Annette's head was spinning. Internal bleeding? Yellow tape around her front
porch? "WHERE IS MY SON?" she demanded. A police officer said he had just been
taken to Sinai-Grace.
"But I work there! I just came from there! . . ."
Minutes later she was back at the hospital, running instinctively to the
trauma room, because if the victim is in the trauma room, she knew, it means
he's still alive and they're trying to save his life.
But Darryl -- her youngest child, her movie partner, her kitchen helper -- was
not in the trauma room. He was in a room off to the side, alone, on a gurney.
And suddenly, Annette Towns was at the hospital not as an employee, but as
next of kin.
"His body was still warm, and I held him and kissed him," she whispers now. "I
stayed there with him alone for 15 minutes. They gave me that, I guess,
because I work there."
She is sitting inside her small but tidy house on Fielding Street. A strongly
set woman with an easy smile, she is not only a single mother who has raised
an educated family, but she has worked for years in emergency rooms and
intensive care wards. She has seen doctors crack open rib cages to give heart
massages. She has seen babies born with organs outside the skin.
You would figure Annette Towns has seen it all. But as she dabs her eyes with
a tissue it's clear that she never figured to see this: her two older
children, Kevin, 25, and Monique, 21, safe inside the house.
And Darryl, her baby, never coming home.
"I keep expecting him to come through the door, you know?" she says. "I keep
expecting to hear him say, 'Mama, did you get me that jacket I wanted for
Christmas?' I keep expecting to hear his basketball bouncing out in the
driveway.
"I mean, everyone loved Darryl. The whole neighborhood knew him. I don't
understand. These boys were his friends! Why would friends do this?"
Why would friends do this? The incident that led to Darryl's death was so
small, so ...nothing, that you can only shake your head at the senselessness.
Here is what happened, according to police reports and interviews with
witnesses: On that Thursday evening, Darryl was at home. A couple of girls
from the neighborhood were in the house visiting. Two of Darryl's teenage
friends, Lynell Drake and Jonathan Nettles -- better known as John-John --
came by and knocked on the door. They wanted to play basketball on the hoop
behind Darryl's house, a hoop his mother constructed years ago by cementing a
pole into the middle of a tire.
With or without Darryl's permission -- it is not clear -- the two teens played
ball. Eventually, John-John wanted to enter the house. He and Lynell banged
repeatedly on the door, yelling to Darryl: "Let us in! Let us in!" Darryl
refused. He had instructions from his mother that only certain friends were
allowed inside when she wasn't home. John-John was not one of them.
The banging and yelling continued. Darryl got angry. His friend Ron-Ron came
over, tried to calm him down, but by now the teens were into one of those "He
can't do that to me" things, Darryl thinking "they can't disrespect my house
in front of these girls," and John-John thinking "he can't lock me out in
front of these girls."
Foolish? Yes. Unusual? No. Darryl finally went outside and got into a tussle
with John-John. It didn't last long. Darryl was 10 inches taller. When it was
over, and John-John had "lost," he went away embarrassed and angry.
"You better watch your back," he allegedly warned Darryl. "You're gonna get
your cranium cracked."
An hour or so later, John-John returned. And, as is so often the case, he had
company to help him exact his revenge. Lynell was there. So was another
15-year-old named Patrick Roberts. Unfortunately, so was Patrick's older
brother, a 24-year-old named Damon Smith.
And Damon had a gun.
You can pretty much finish the tale yourself. John-John banged on the door.
There was yelling. More yelling. Eventually Darryl made the mistake of going
outside. A fight broke out. The others got involved. They skirmished in the
driveway.
And then, as Patrick later told police, "I was hitting Darryl and I got up and
I saw my brother Damon with the gun.
"Darryl was still on the ground.
"My brother shot him.
"We took off running.
"We ran back to the car.
"Jonathan dropped me and Damon off....
"We walked home."
Darryl died.
And that's the end of the story.
Kill like adults, pray like kids
The funeral was held at St. Suzanne. Father Dennis Duggan, who had watched the
Baptist-born Darryl come every Sunday to learn Catholicism -- just so he could
keep playing on the church basketball team -- presided over his death service.
Darryl's teammates put basketball medals in his coffin. His No. 33 jersey was
retired, although "retired" seems ironic when applied to a 15-year-old.
The Cody High football coaches mourned the talent that would no longer catch
touchdown passes.
The eulogy pamphlet, with pictures of Darryl as a smiling little boy, included
a poem:
Little one, little one,
Where have you gone?
Your going has darkened
the brightest dawn ...
On butterfly's wings?
In the heart of a rose?
Who knows, who knows,
where a little one goes?
The four suspects were arrested. They face murder charges and possible life in
prison. One is a man. The others are barely old enough to drive.
And this week, Annette Towns placed a Christmas wreath on her son's tombstone.
"My kids keep asking me, 'Mama, why you keep going to the cemetery?' " she
says. "I say, 'Because it's quiet there. I can talk to him. I can say what I
want to say.'
"I'm going today to give Darryl a Christmas blanket. He always loved
Christmas. He'd stand by me when I made the sweet potato pie and he'd say, 'We
gotta test it first, Mama.' And he'd eat a whole big piece...."
Kids fight. They always have. Had there not been a gun involved in this story,
this might not be a story. There would have been black eyes and bruised egos
and nothing more.
Instead, because guns are so available, because this country balks at the
slightest limitation on bearing arms, and because the inner city is the last
place anyone seems concerned about children, kids like Darryl come out of
fights not with bruises but with bullet holes.
Over what? Over nothing. "We were all friends," Ron-Ron says now, almost
pleading. "We played basketball together. Why'd that guy have to have a gun? .
. ."
A month after the slaying, Annette Towns received a letter from one of the
suspects, 16-year-old Lynell Drake. It read, in part:
I look at the results of my actions, the actions of being a follower, and I
sigh ...why am I in this predicament? ...
The incident was a total mistake.... The life of a future president or a
famous star has been taken because of "fear." Fear to take a fight on the
losing end. Fear to be embarrassed. ...
Each night I cry and pray myself to sleep. I cry and ask that God and the
family of Darryl forgive me for having even the slightest part in the death of
another "being." ...
I ask that I be given the life back that I once had and never cherished, so I
can continue learning in school. ...
PLEASE FORGIVE ME!
They pray like children.
They kill like adults.
In the tidy house on Fielding Street, a block where everyone knows everyone
else and where everyone liked her son, Annette Towns has only a scrapbook of
pictures to hug and kiss.
"Not too long ago, I had a dream about Darryl," she says, forcing a smile. "He
came to me and said, 'Mama, don't worry. I'm OK. I'm always home.' "
But that's the thing. He was already home. He was following her rules. He was
doing the right thing. "If they could all be like that . . ." we say.
But Darryl Towns was like that. It couldn't save him. And today, at the end of
the century, because we can't control our children, our tempers, or our guns,
there is a Christmas wreath hanging on a tombstone. And another piece of our
city's future is buried beneath it.
MITCH ALBOM can be reached at 313-223-4581 or albom@freepress.com. Listen to
Mitch's radio show, "Albom in the Afternoon," 3-6 p.m. weekdays on WJR-AM
(760).
THIS ELECTRONIC VERSION MAY DIFFER SLIGHTLY FROM THE PRINTED ARTICLE.
SERIES;HIGH SCHOOL;ATHLETE;HOMICIDE;DETROIT;DARRYL TOWNS