The first time I heard a mother say, “My son wasn’t in no gang,” I remember thinking how strange it was that grief had to start with a defense.
As if love itself needed an alibi.
Last week in the Bronx, at a vigil lit by candles and cellphone flashlights, a mother said those words again — this time about her 16-year-old son, Christopher “CJ” Redding, a high school football player who was shot and killed while trying to run from bullets that weren’t meant for him.
And I couldn’t help but wonder: when did childhood start needing character witnesses?
Because somewhere between a McDonald’s argument and a street corner escalation, a teenager who should have been worrying about touchdowns and homework became what cities have learned to call an “innocent bystander.”
A phrase so common it has almost become municipal vocabulary.
But innocence, it seems to me, should never require adjectives.
I grew up believing adolescence had a certain elasticity — that 16 stretched forward into possibility.
Driver’s licenses.
First loves.
College brochures.
Dreams still soft enough to reshape.
But in too many neighborhoods across New York, 16 also stretches sideways — into proximity.
Proximity to conflict.
To reputation.
To masculinity performed in public.
To guns that enter arguments before reason does.
CJ wasn’t the target, authorities say.
He was just there.
And “just there” has become one of the most dangerous places a teenager can be.
Because urban geography has its own physics: disputes accelerate in tight spaces, pride travels fast in groups, and adolescence often arrives without the emotional brakes adults assume it has.
I kept thinking about that — about how quickly a night can pivot from ordinary to irreversible.
A fast-food restaurant.
A disagreement.
A gathering.
A fight.
Shots.
And a boy running.
Always the detail that undoes me most in stories like this is movement — the attempt to escape.
Because running means he knew.
Running means he chose life.
Running means there was still future in his body.
And yet, the city caught up with him anyway.
What stayed with me longest wasn’t the police report.
It was his father’s memory.
“Me and him finally had our last one-on-one basketball game.”
Finally.
Last.
Two words that only exist after.
There is something unbearably intimate about the way grief edits memory — selecting one ordinary moment and enlarging it until it contains an entire relationship.
A driveway game.
A joke.
A ride home.
Because when violence interrupts a life, parents are left reconstructing their child from fragments the world never saw.
He loved this.
He did that.
He was kind.
He tried.
And always, always: he was good.
I used to think that phrase was about reputation.
But now I think it’s about restoration — parents trying to return their child to humanity after headlines have reduced him to circumstance.
At the vigil, CJ’s parents spoke through tears and anger, the two languages grief most often shares.
They spoke about justice.
About responsibility.
About a world that allowed teenagers to hold weapons and grudges with equal ease.
His father said something that landed with the force of devastation: that parents of youth offenders should share legal punishment for their children’s crimes.
It’s a harsh idea.
But grief is a harsh country.
And beneath his words I heard a different question:
Where were the adults before the bullets?
Because youth violence is rarely youth alone.
It is ecosystem.
Homes stretched thin.
Neighborhoods negotiating survival.
Masculinity learned in peer groups.
Conflict escalating without intervention.
By the time teenagers are shooting, many systems have already looked away.
Living in Harlem, I have watched parents perform a quiet choreography every day — the urban ritual of letting children out into a city that can love them or lose them with equal speed.
Text me when you get there.
Stay with your friends.
Avoid that block.
Come home before dark.
It is parenting under atmospheric risk.
And every time a story like CJ’s crosses borough lines, it feels local — because proximity is the defining feature of city life.
Your child doesn’t have to be the target.
He only has to be nearby.
And suddenly, childhood is measured in distance from someone else’s anger.
I keep returning to that last basketball game.
Because sports, at its core, is rehearsal for future — discipline, teamwork, aspiration.
A father and son on a court are practicing continuity:
I teach you.
You grow.
You surpass me.
But when a child dies, continuity collapses.
Parents are left holding memory instead of milestones.
No graduation.
No career.
No grandchildren.
Just a last game they didn’t know was last.
There is a cultural reflex after youth violence to talk about statistics — crime rates, policy, enforcement.
And those matter.
But beneath every number is a private universe abruptly sealed.
A bedroom untouched.
Shoes by the door.
A phone that will never light again.
And parents repeating the same unbearable sentence in different cities:
“My son was a good boy.”
As if goodness should have been armor.
As if innocence should have been enough.
As if love could have stopped a bullet already in motion.
When I think about CJ, I don’t see the street.
I see the court.
A father guarding lightly.
A son laughing.
A ball echoing against concrete.
The ordinary miracle of time still ahead.
And I can’t help but wonder —
in cities where teenagers must navigate proximity to violence before they’ve even finished becoming themselves,
how many last games are happening right now
without anyone knowing?
By Jarvus Ricardo Hester
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