A life on the street: Leroy Lewis
By Kia Gregory
Inquirer Staff Writer
PART ONE:
Forty-three minutes past midnight, a crackle pierced the summer air. For a moment, Leroy
Lewis, perched on a concrete wall beside a rowhouse in his Juniata Park neighborhood, talking
to two friends, dismissed the sound as leftover fireworks.
When Lewis, 19, turned to look, he saw a young man, his baseball cap tilted low, moving from
the alleyway across the narrow street, pointing a gun, hunting.
"The next shot was me looking at him," Lewis recounted later. "I just seen a whole bunch of
fire."
Lewis took off, dipping behind parked cars, as bullets cut through his stomach, his buttocks,
an ankle, a shoulder, and a thigh. His friends were also hit, one in the chest, the other in a
thigh.
As Lewis collapsed a block away on some rowhouse steps, shot six times, one thought filled
his mind: "I'm going to die."
Hours later, as chief trauma surgeon Amy Goldberg scanned the list of patients rushed into
Temple University Hospital's emergency room overnight on July 9, 2008, one name stood out.
"Not again," Goldberg thought.
Ten months before, on Sept. 1, 2007, she had stitched and stapled together Lewis' stomach,
ripped open by a bullet.
Goldberg, 48, remembered how Lewis had worked hard to recover, in the hospital for weeks,
visiting the trauma clinic for months, calling her Miss Amy. Lewis admitted to hospital staff
that he'd sold drugs, on and off. But unlike many gunshot patients - brooding, itching to get
back to the street - Lewis, then 18, said he wanted to change
Now here he was again. Goldberg, who had completed her residency at Temple 16 years
earlier, couldn't help but wonder, "How long before he is lost for good?"
Three perilous ages
It is a haunting question about one of Philadelphia's most exhaustive, expensive, frustrating,
and mournful problems:
From 2004 through 2008, 8,314 shootings in the city produced victims. Of the victims, 623
were 19-year-olds, more than any other age group. Add 18- and 20-year-olds - 1,071 more
victims - and those in this three-year bridge to adulthood were 17 times more likely than
other Philadelphians to be shot.
Eighty-four percent of the 18-, 19- and 20-year-old gunshot victims were African American
males.
Why is this age group most at risk?
"I don't know if anyone has the answer yet," said Sam Gulino, the city's chief medical
examiner, who is conducting a study of 15 years of youth homicide data.
"From a commonsense standpoint, it's the first time kids are out of school, so a large portion
of their time is not structured by activities. If you have a 17-year-old who is cutting school,
there's the school or DHS to intervene. When you're 19, none of that stuff exists."
When he was 19, the voids in Lewis' life were daunting but not uncommon: a single-mother
home, a dismal education, little job experience, self-doubt, a lack of motivation, a need to
take care of himself and be respected as a man, and his frustration of not knowing how.
"Some of these guys don't know how to catch a bus out of their neighborhood," said Darryl
Coates, executive director of the nonprofit Philadelphia Anti-Drug/Anti-Violence Network. "And
when they walk out the door, and guns, drugs and violence are all they see, and are exposed
to, what do we expect? We have to show our young people there's all these opportunities out
there, and what they look like."
Most programs focus on juveniles in the city's Department of Human Servies system or young
probationers. But "to meet the needs of this 19-year-old who's on the cusp," said Deputy
Mayor of Public Safety Everett Gillison, "the only programs right now are few and far between.
This is the hardest nut to crack."
On Lewis' path to adulthood, he made his choices often marred by an impatient temper. He
became a delinquent and a drug dealer, a kid easy to write off.
"A lot of people aren't going to give this young man sympathy," said sociologist Elijah
Anderson.
Anderson, a Philadelphia native, an author, and a Yale University professor, has studied black
urban culture in the city for three decades.
"A lot of that has to do with the fact that the young black male, what he represents as a
stereotype, is an alienating figure. People want to blame him for what's happening."
The bottom line, said Scott Charles, trauma outreach coordinator at Temple University
Hospital, is "we can moralize it all we want. But if we don't change his circumstances so he
can be more stable, there's nothing to make him less likely to come back to us."
"The violence," Charles said, "can stop here if we give him the tools that he needs. If not,
violence in the city is going to increase exponentially."
What happened to Lewis between the ages of 18 and 20 - shot twice in less than a year,
careening between life as a man-child and as a corner drug hustler - reveals the battle young
men like him, without discernible skills, face in navigating their futures. For some, outcomes
are predictable. They end up dead, or in jail. For Lewis, no one could predict the troubles to
come.
Trauma of being shot
While Lewis lay in a hospital bed in July 2008, a chest tube helping him breathe, Charles
phoned Doris Spears, the case-management supervisor of PIRIS, the Pennsylvania Injury
Reporting and Intervention System, to tell her that Lewis had been shot a second time.
PIRIS, a pilot initiative, began in April 2006. With a $1.3 million budget, the program aimed to
catch gunshot victims ages 15 to 24 when they were most apt to listen: while in a hospital
bed.
At three hospitals, outreach workers like Charles referred patients to the program, run out of
a Center City office. Once enrolled, gunshot victims were guided by case managers through a
labyrinth of social services to help prevent them from being struck by gun violence again.
More than half of those in the program, PIRIS data found, had left high school without a
diploma, and 67 percent were unemployed when they were shot.
Surviving a bullet can be a time to rebuild a life - or a prelude to more violence. After
surgeons like Goldberg stitch them back together, many patients return to the neighborhoods,
friends, and lifestyles that got them shot in the first place. Mental-health experts say many of
these walking wounded suffer the same mental distress as combat veterans in Iraq and
Afghanistan, stress that often goes unchecked and untreated.
In fact, "most people who have been shot develop post-traumatic stress disorder," said Paul
Fink, a psychiatry professor at Temple University's School of Medicine and chairman of the
city's youth homicide committee. "Being shot is a real trauma, and people have a great deal
of difficulty overcoming it."
Feelings of fear and helplessness become barriers to finding a job or returning to school, he
said. Anger fuels the urge to retaliate, the need to return to the neighborhood bigger and
badder. Gunshot victims struggle "with the idea that you're going to be killed, that you're
going to be shot again, that your life is over," Fink said.
The first time Charles referred Lewis to PIRIS in September 2007, after he'd been shot in the
stomach, Lewis rejected the program. Frustrated that after weeks he hadn't connected with a
case manager, Lewis demanded that Charles rip up his PIRIS paperwork. Lewis refused to
reconsider. It was the same self-defeating behavior that Charles had seen in gunshot patients
many times before.
"You can't expect him to get motivated if he doesn't know what direction to run in," Charles
said. "He needs more than a job. He needs someone to help him with adulthood."
Ten months later, Charles updated Spears, PIRIS' case-management supervisor. Lewis was
back in the ER, he told her, shot six times. Goldberg, the trauma surgeon, 5-foot-2 with dark,
spiky hair, stood nearby, listening to Charles' half of the conversation. At one point, overcome
with concern, she leaned over and yelled into the phone: "You're taking him!"
Three days later - with a tenuous reconnection to PIRIS in place - Lewis was discharged.
'It's about the block'
A month later, on a warm afternoon in early August 2008, Lewis sat hunched on the tan sofa
in his mother's living room, accented with family photographs and African art.
Sunlight peeked through the drawn curtains, beyond which lie the tree-lined streets and
redbrick houses of Juniata Park, a diverse, working-class community north of Kensington.
"I don't like to be seen outside," Lewis said, swatting his sister's orange kitten with his socked
feet.
Lewis, a lean 5-11, wore a billowy white T-shirt and blue jeans. A white do-rag covered his
short dreadlocks. A tattoo on his right hand read "Black," his nickname on the street for his
mahogany skin.
With his mother at her job as an aide at a nursing home, and his younger siblings away for
the summer or at day care, Lewis spent most of his time in his room, watching BET, listening
to the Notorious B.I.G. or Lil Wayne, or sleeping, waiting for his life to take a turn.
As he opened up to a reporter, he leaned in, his brown eyes cast toward the floor. He spoke in
polite tones, and sometimes displayed the grin of a shy, awkward teen.
Since he was 16, when he managed to graduate from high school, Lewis said, he'd dealt
drugs on and off. Standing not far from his home, in an alley overlooking neighbors' kitchens
and back bedrooms, he sold crack, marijuana, and pills. He wouldn't discuss the source of the
drugs he sold, sticking to a no-snitching code, telling his story and no one else's. But it was
clear from what he said that he had been a vendor, not a supplier. He described his world
then: "Doing dumb stuff, like what regular teenagers do. Buyin' a whole bunch of clothes and
sneaks, drinkin', and smokin' " weed.
The shootings, 10 months apart, had little to do with other, he said.
"It's about the block," he explained. "They try to get the money I have."
The shooting in September 2007 was over a debt, he said. Lewis was walking to the corner
deli with a girl when he ran into a drug dealer who owed him money.
Lewis couldn't remember how much, maybe $100. More so, he wanted the respect the debt
had cost him. "What's up?" Lewis demanded. The 18-year-old blew him off.
Nights later, when they saw each other on the north side of Hunting Park Avenue, insults
were exchanged, and a fight erupted outside a neighbor's home. As the two wrestled to the
ground, Lewis said, he felt a "real hard punch" as a bullet burrowed into his abdomen. A
bystander had shot him in the stomach.
The police report reveals only the barest facts: "Complainant was shot at the above location
and transported to Temple hospital by private auto. Complainant received a gun shot wound
to the stomach. Complainant is in critical condition. . . . There are no known witnesses. . . ."
Wounded, riding in a friend's dark sedan, Lewis said, he felt his body growing warm.
Vomiting, writhing in pain, he screamed to Temple ER doctors: "Get this out of me." After
surgery, an infection required his incision to remain open for weeks, leaving a gaping wound.
The shooting and the entire ordeal are indelibly marked by a jagged scar from his sternum to
his navel.
What led to the second shooting is harder to discern. That July night in 2008, Lewis stood in
the alley where he dealt drugs, hunched over a pile of money in a dice game. He had cleaned
up, and as the players dispersed, he gave one pouter a $20 consolation. The teen handed it
back, using the money to buy a "couple of jays," from him, Lewis said.
He left but returned moments later, this time looking for "wet," marijuana dipped in
embalming fluid. "I don't have it," Lewis said he had told him, "but I know where I can get it."
Lewis phoned someone and placed the order. While they waited in the alley, on the side of a
rowhouse, 43 minutes after midnight - Lewis thinks the whole thing may have been a setup someone opened fire. The shooter's rage may have come from the dice game, or an argument
over a smacked cigarette two weeks before, or the constant eruptions over who controlled the
alley's trade. No one knows anymore.
The six shots, marked by nine dime-size bullet wounds, have left Lewis with a limp; his left
foot shattered, achy, and weak; and lingering thoughts of betrayal.
Now the prisoner of his own living room, he was tired of the block, tired of a life going
nowhere. He wanted a job, he said, and the chance to study business at community college so
he could go into real estate like his grandfather in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he had grown up.
A few days earlier, Lewis had shared these goals with PIRIS case manager Tinisha Scott.
Scott, 28, saddled with 10 other clients, said she'd return in a week to develop a plan, leaving
Lewis somewhat encouraged.
He did not have a driver's license, and he'd held only one job, housekeeping part time at the
nursing home where his mother works.
"I don't really believe nothing until I see it," Lewis said. "But I'm just thinking and hoping I
could be able to pursue what I want to do with their help. I truly don't wanna be outside."
Surviving gunfire twice, he felt like a marked man.
According to police records, no one was arrested in the first shooting. Lewis figured that when
his assailant got out of jail - he was incarcerated for another crime - "we can just settle it like
men," Lewis had assured guys in the neighborhood. "Rumble in the street in front of
everybody if need be."
In the second shooting, the 18-year-old arrested by police was not convicted. None of the
witnesses, including Lewis, bothered to come forward. But that wasn't why Lewis was afraid.
He believed neighborhood rivals and wannabes would view his death as a prize, like winning a
giant teddy bear at a fair.
"There's just so much hatred," Lewis said of the streets. "They gonna look at me like, 'Who do
he think he is?' and they gonna try."
Whether Lewis was being pursued by hooded gunmen, or paranoia, remained to be seen.
As Lewis talked, his cell phone rang often, his mother, calling from her job, checking,
worrying.
"Hi, Mommy," he answered.
"OK, Mommy," peppered his conversation, and for the moment, Lewis sounded like a little
boy.
After he hung up, he explained: "She scared. She scared for my life out here like I'm scared
for my life out here. She feels as though it's not going to be no third chance."
Growing up in Brooklyn
Lewis remembered his mother, Paulette Lewis, raising four little boys on her own, rarely let
them play outside their three-bedroom apartment in a Brooklyn rowhouse his grandfather
owned.
The family was close-knit, and every night, Lewis said, nodding for emphasis, members
gathered at his grandparents' nearby home for Bible study.
His grandfather, a doorman most of his life, was a deacon at First Born Assembly Pentecostal
church. Lewis described him as a man of quiet strength "who doesn't talk, who's about doing."
His grandmother led prayer meetings.
In raising her boys, his mother didn't spare the rod, Lewis said. "Oh, Ma Dukes didn't play,"
he snickered, using his nickname for her.
His mother worked as a health aide when she could, caring for elderly people in their homes.
Around their basement apartment, money was tight.
Lewis, the third oldest, the chatterbox, loved hearing his mother read to him. He has little
memory of his father - his spitting image, relatives like to tell him. From his mother, he has
pieced together the story of a man who ran the streets, courted trouble, and got deported to
Jamaica when Lewis was 3.
About three years later, his mother's boyfriend, a childhood friend, Cecil Waldron, moved in,
and came to know Lewis as a good kid who had "a lot of pent-up frustration."
Looking back, Lewis believes that growing up without a father, the rigidness of Bible study
every night, the lack of material things, and the constant punching matches with his brothers
all touched him.
When he acted up in school or disobeyed his mother at home, where she would dismiss him
as "hardheaded" or "just like your father," Waldron pulled him aside, trying to offer discipline
and direction.
"They were looking for a father," Waldron said. "They wanted a father."
Waldron, who worked in a nursing-home laundry, bought Lewis and his brothers clothes, took
them to the park to play and ride bikes, and sat with them at the kitchen table for homework.
"As long as the schoolwork is done," he'd tell them, "you're going to get what you deserve."
Remembering Waldron, Lewis said: "He did more for me than a father would. He gave me
boundaries."
A broken family
But when Lewis was 10, Waldron and his mother broke up. She moved to Philadelphia to stay
with an aunt, bringing with her Lewis, his younger brother, and the baby girl she'd had with
Waldron. Lewis' two older brothers stayed in Brooklyn with their grandparents.
"Once I came to Philly, everything just went downhill for me," Lewis said. He missed his
brothers, his grandparents, everything he had in Brooklyn.
The family moved twice, with Lewis attending two different schools. With each move, he
became more disruptive. By sixth grade, he had settled into Benjamin Rush Middle School in
Northeast Philadelphia, where he struggled with math.
"I just couldn't get it, and I figured if I couldn't get it, no one was," he recalled with a chuckle.
In math class, Lewis threw paper balls, talked back, talked to everyone. He enjoyed the
attention, the tough-guy reputation he earned in fights.
It all ended one afternoon in the hall, in a scuffle between Lewis and a math teacher over a
basketball. The teacher said Lewis had hit him, which Lewis denies.
School officials acted swiftly, and Lewis' days of disrupting classes at Benjamin Rush Middle
School were over.
A family court judge ordered him to Stillmeadow Inc., a now-closed juvenile residential facility
north of Scranton, the first in a chain of alternative schools that would make up most of the
rest of his education.
"I thought it would have been good for him," his mother said, looking back. "What I saw, he
got worse."
Shallcross, a disciplinary school in Northeast Philadelphia, was next. During his year there,
Lewis said, he was constantly suspended for fighting and upsetting class until he "got kicked
out." So in the fall of 2003, his mother sent him to his grandparents in Brooklyn, to live under
his grandfather's biblical lessons, hard work ethic, and stern gaze.
Lewis, then 14, welcomed the return. As for his grandfather, Essert Cameron, he said he had
wanted "to see if I could make something out of him."
His grandfather enrolled Lewis in Samuel Tilden High School, and gave him chores: Take out
the garbage, mop the floors, clean the yard.
One Saturday, seeing his brother and cousin enjoying television while he worked, Lewis
complained: "Why is everything me?"
"That just turned me off completely," his grandfather said. On top of it, his grandfather
learned that Lewis, still struggling with math, was skipping classes to hang out with his
friends.
"I wanted him to have good friends," his grandfather said. "Friends that would help him, not
drag him down. But he didn't listen."
After the school year, he sent his grandson back to Philadelphia to his mother.
A graduate at 16
In June 2005, at a Community Education Partners-run disciplinary school, Lewis learned that,
with his New York credits, he had enough to graduate. He was 16.
At his tiny ceremony, in a dull auditorium, he and seven other students marched to the stage
in black caps and gowns while relatives looked on from folding chairs.
"It felt good," Lewis reminisced. "I felt like, 'Wow.' "
Out of school, with no job experience and college just a distant concept, Lewis hung out in the
neighborhood as the summer waned. He soon met up with a friend from disciplinary school.
The two had promised to meet up when they were released - "kick it on the outside," Lewis
said.
The summer was a constant state of recess: on corners, hanging with friends, cracking jokes,
drinking beer, smoking marijuana, and flirting with girls, late into the night. Some friends
flashed their drug money. Others let Lewis and his friend watch the pace of the drug game
firsthand, the ease and the speed in which that money was made. Lewis and his friend saw
opportunity, and before long the two started selling crack cocaine together.
Lewis found he could pocket as much as $600 a day.
"It was all she wrote after that," he said. "I didn't want to go to school. I didn't want a job. I
didn't want to work for nobody. I wanted to get my own money."
He also felt the fraternity of hanging with "my boys," some friends already selling drugs.
"It's like they're with you," Lewis said. "And the girls come around, and the cars. It's like a
family."
Lewis treated his friends to dinners at Red Lobster, drinks at neighborhood bars, and road
trips to Baltimore's Inner Harbor; he indulged himself in trendy clothes, expensive sneakers,
and a dirt bike - things once out of his reach.
Disgusted, his mother gave him an ultimatum: Stop selling drugs or leave the house.
Lewis left.
"I pretty much stayed on the streets," he said, working a corner of the alley, overshadowed
by a bustling commercial street, from early morning until the dark hours of night. "It was
addictive money," he said. "I wasn't too much worried about the consequences. I was just
getting money."
Lewis would pop into a friend's home to grab a bite, wash up, and change clothes, then return
to his corner. The fast money lasted for months, he said, until police busted him for drug
possession. A family court judge sent him six hours away to VisionQuest in northwest
Pennsylvania, a program geared to troubled youths, which Lewis called "boot camp."
"It felt like a vacation to me," he said.
He enjoyed the drills, the cadences, and the horseback rides. But "guys were always trying to
push you." Fights erupted over stares, bumps, cigarettes.
One day in late December, in the break room, Lewis and some guys were sitting around the
television while another group played pool, trash talking, laughing, and sinking balls.
"Quiet the f- down," Lewis said he had yelled.
"Nah, we ain't quieting down," a pool player fired back. "Turn the TV up."
That was it.
On his feet, Lewis asserted, "You can see me in my room." He was prepared to settle the silly
disagreement with his fists, as he had so many times before. If he let this guy punk him, he
felt, others would rush to follow.
A brawl ensued. According to Venango County Court records, Lewis and two other males
jumped the pool player, splitting his lip.
Lewis pleaded guilty to simple assault, and was sentenced to six to 231/2 months of
probation. It was a month after his 18th birthday; it was his first adult record.
Back home in 2007, and sick of the block, sick of the cops and the stickup boys, sick of his
mother in his ear, sick of a life going nowhere, Lewis got his first and only job: housekeeping
at the nursing home where his mother worked.
A month later, trying to collect an old drug debt, he was shot in the stomach, his first
encounter with Goldberg and Charles at Temple University Hospital. After Lewis gave up on
PIRIS, he went back to selling drugs on the block.
"I was just so down and hurt," he recalled. "I just didn't care anymore."
Ten months later, standing in the alley where he dealt drugs, his dice game winnings in his
pocket, he was shot again, six shots that left multiple wounds.
PART TWO:
The Endless Cycle of Drugs and Violence
Longing for success, battling demons
For young men like Leroy Lewis, escaping life on "the block" can be a frustrating effort.
By Kia Gregory
Inquirer Staff Writer
Last of two parts
In early September 2008, Leroy Lewis paced the living room of his family's rowhouse in Juniata Park,
restless.
Two months had crept by since he had been shot, the second time in less than a year. The recovering 19year-old was eager for a future, but unsure how to move beyond his past.
Sitting home alone while his mother worked and his younger siblings were at day care or away for the
summer, Lewis could peer out from behind the curtains and almost see the corner where he had sold drugs
on and off since he was 16, hanging with his friends, and stuffing his pocket with $600 a day in wadded-up
bills.
Surviving gunfire twice, he waited for his life to take some type of turn.
With his growing frustration, he shared many symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder with combat
veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan - anger, flashbacks, hopelessness - though his free-fire zones were
much closer at hand.
The previous September, Lewis, then employed as a housekeeper at the nursing home where his mother
worked as a health aide, was shot in the stomach over an old drug debt. Ten months later, he was shot
again, six times, another eruption from "the block."
He now wanted another life.
Walking the room, he talked of how he had gone from store to store on nearby Roosevelt Boulevard,
looking for a job. He applied at Wal-Mart for a position stocking shelves, anything, he said. But when a letter
came, he knew from the first sentences that he didn't get the job.
"I didn't even read the whole thing," he said. "I just threw it away."
He said he'd also inquired at community college about taking the SATs, and went to CHI Institute, a trade
school, with his high school diploma tucked under his arm, for an application. "They still haven't called back
yet."
His limp from the recent shooting was noticeable. He patted the hard knot in his abdomen from the first. His
doctor said he might develop a hernia.
"Why can't I get a job?" he wondered. "I got a diploma. I'm not a dumb kid, and I can't even get a job if my
life depended on it."
To a prospective employer, Lewis lacked promise.
He had no driver's license and little job experience. A month after his 18th birthday, after a brawl in a
juvenile placement facility, he had pleaded guilty to simple assault and got probation, the first mark on his
adult criminal record.
Now, in searching for a job, Lewis had plenty of company.
At 19, he was a member of a group of black youth throughout the country for whom unemployment hovered
at 35 percent. By fall, as the economy spiraled, the number would rise to 50 percent.
Lewis had all but given up on Tinisha Scott, a case manager from PIRIS, the Pennsylvania Injury Reporting
and Intervention System, a pilot initiative created to help young gunshot victims put their lives back together.
Lewis said Scott had canceled appointments; Scott said Lewis hadn't returned calls and often wasn't home.
"Leroy had a lot of potential," Scott later said, noting his high school diploma. "He'll talk a good game, but
he's going to die in these streets, God forbid, or get locked up. He didn't learn his lesson."
As Lewis paced the room, he did not yet realize that he had been dropped from PIRIS, labeled "unable to
continue engagement," a term case-management supervisor Doris Spears said is used for hard-to-reach
clients.
According to PIRIS data, of the 332 gunshot patients whom hospitals referred to the program in its three
years, only 56 percent were enrolled. The remaining victims either refused help when contacted by
caseworkers or could not be contacted.
Lewis' relationship with his mother was also strained. Tired from work and stressed over bills, she had been
complaining about his idling around the house.
"She in here putting a burden on my shoulders knowing I can't do nothing," he said. "I'm sitting here looking
like a dummy 'cause I ain't doing nothing, just waiting, watching TV, and going to the bathroom."
He paused, reasoning.
"I be trying, but I can't sit here and argue with my mom about not having a job, because I should have a job.
It's me, too, because when I do try and it be like a no-go, I just go right back to the block. Then when I get
tired of the block, I try again, and it don't work, and then it be like . . ."
Lewis let out a scream.
If he sat in the house, his mom was mad. If he did "the block," his mom was mad.
The first made him feel like a lesser man. The second was just outside his door, waiting.
"It's the only thing I really know," he said. "That's what I fall back to. If I can't get a job or do something else,
I'm doing the block."
Staring out the window, Lewis reminisced about his stint at the nursing home, his brown uniform, the pride
of having somewhere to be in the morning. He had the job only a month before he was shot in the stomach.
When he was unable to walk or eat after surgery, his employment ended.
"I know this ain't nothing," he said, throwing his arms up at his days now.
"I want to be good. I don't want to be 25 and out here pitching nicks and dimes. Why I want to keep doing
that? Change the plan. I want to see me in my real estate business. I want to see me progressing, that's
all."
A maternal ultimatum
Sitting at her dining room table on her day off, Paulette Lewis, 41, a soft-spoken woman with tired eyes,
searched for answers.
Two weeks earlier, she had issued an ultimatum, and Lewis moved out, back to the block.
Maybe her son was troubled because she was a single mother, she thought. Maybe she spoiled him.
Maybe she wasn't stern enough.
"I don't know what went wrong," she said, tears in her eyes.
While doing the laundry, she had found marijuana in Lewis' pants pocket.
She had stood over him, as he sat on the couch watching TV, and demanded: "When are you going to get
off the street and do better?"
"I'm trying," Lewis had said.
"You're not trying hard enough! You cannot be here if this is what you're going to do."
Lewis had run upstairs and slammed the bathroom door. Her daughter came down and told her he was
crying.
Paulette Lewis had gone to him, and begged, "What's wrong?"
"I'm trying," he chanted. "I'm trying."
In his own way, she knew he was. But over the summer, she had watched his efforts wane.
"Leroy knows he's doing bad, and he wants to do good, but he don't know how. He just got caught up in the
wrong crowd. I told him, 'You need to keep trying. You just don't give up like that.' "
She tried to be an example, offering him her struggle - as a mother of five who worked full time - to become
a registered nurse, of failing the test, of continuing to try.
"He's very frustrated," she said, her hair wrapped in a black scarf. "He's afraid of failing."
Shortly after their argument, Lewis again made his choice. He moved out, back on the block.
A few days earlier, while driving through the neighborhood, the tassel from his graduation mortarboard
hanging from her rearview mirror, she spotted him standing on a corner.
Lewis stared at her, blankly. Then he smiled.
"My heart breaks," she said, her voice trembling, "because I don't know what kind of trouble is going to
happen out there with him."
Her tears continued to fall.
"I feel as though I'm going to have to bury him soon."
Everyone's fears realized
By October 2008, everyone's fears for Lewis had caught up to him.
One night, Amy Goldberg, chief trauma surgeon at Temple University Hospital, pulled the curtain back in
the trauma bay and found Lewis stabbed twice in the back.
Goldberg had stitched and stapled together Lewis' stomach after the first shooting and had pushed PIRIS to
enroll him after the second.
Lewis refused to talk to her about the stabbing. She noticed a cold change in him, from the cooperative teen
who before had called her Miss Amy.
"I just again felt terrible," Goldberg remembered, "that we had failed him in some way."
The stabbing, Lewis later explained, was over his girlfriend. Standing with her on a train platform earlier that
day, Lewis had confronted a young man who'd supposedly flirted with her days before, behind Lewis' back.
Their exchange ended with Lewis' hands around his throat. With the fight over, Lewis was counting change
for the fare when he felt something warm prick his back.
Before he could turn around, he felt it again. He dropped the coins in his hand. As he turned, he saw the
young man he had choked, his attacker, running out of sight.
Two weeks after the stabbing, at 4:30 one Monday afternoon, according to police records, two brothers, 17
and 19, were talking with a younger friend near an alleyway behind a stretch of houses in Juniata Park, a
block from where Lewis had been shot the second time. Two cars, a burgundy sedan and a white Cadillac,
cruised through, their passenger windows down.
All of a sudden, the brothers heard five, six gunshots and saw flashes of light coming from the sedan.
The brothers dropped to the ground, unhurt.
The motive is still a mystery.
Police later learned from a witness that one black male exited each car and started "shooting at the
complainants."
The bullets missed.
When the shooting stopped, the brothers ran home, and the cars peeled off.
Three witnesses identified Lewis and one of his older brothers as the shooters, "enough probable cause to
issue a warrant," according to the police report.
Lewis' brother was quickly arrested for attempted murder. Lewis fled to his grandparents in Brooklyn, "out of
fear for my life."
Lewis had been candid about most aspects of his life during this time, but when it came to the shooting
incident, he offered nothing. He wouldn't acknowledge his, or anyone's, involvement, or even hint at which
slight, debt, or feud might have precipitated the event, likely honoring the code of the streets he had
gambled in.
In Brooklyn, as his grandparents' home sat dark and quiet at night, his grandmother noticed Lewis pacing
the hallway and mumbling to himself.
"I couldn't eat. I couldn't sleep," Lewis recalled. "The walls were closing in."
When he did venture out, he saw "evil in people's faces," so he retreated inside.
He kept replaying the two shootings. He worried about his brother locked away in jail. And now he was
alone, hiding. Reality was slipping.
"I was hearing voices," Lewis continued, his eyes wide. "Everything everyone ever said to me came back."
Go to school. Keep busy. Stay off the street. What are you doing with your life?
"I jumped out of my skin," he said. "I was breaking down."
His grandmother called his mother to collect him, as her husband had done summers before when he
couldn't deal with Lewis' behavior. On the drive home, his mother noticed that Lewis was "seeing" things out
the window that weren't there, and she took him straight to the Fairmount Institute, a psychiatric hospital. He
stayed a month.
Doctors prescribed anger-management classes and medication. According to Lewis and his mother, he was
diagnosed with schizophrenia. However, several mental-health experts who have studied the effects of gun
violence, including Paul Fink, a psychiatry professor at Temple University's School of Medicine and
chairman of the city's youth homicide committee, say that the diagnosis is overused and that post-traumatic
stress disorder (PTSD) is more likely. Its symptoms include flashbacks, anger, avoidance, hopelessness and hearing and seeing things that are not there.
"His symptoms and his actions are not accidental or consistent with a new onset schizophrenia," said Annie
Steinberg, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.
Instead, Steinberg said, the visions and voices inside Lewis' head were likely caused by PTSD or "untreated
depression with psychotic features," caused by being in the crosshairs of violence, shot twice, and stabbed.
"They are all related to the events that occurred. These are not random paranoid delusions. They are
thoughts of regret."
On Feb. 16, 2009, the day Lewis was discharged from Fairmount, his mother took him to the 35th Police
District, at Broad and Champlost Streets, to turn himself in on an open warrant for attempted murder in the
October shooting. Charges against his brother had been dropped weeks earlier, when, after several
preliminary hearings, none of the witnesses appeared in court.
At the station, according to the police report, Lewis lunged at arresting officers Matthew McCrea and Gerard
Winward, and yelled, "Boom!" Lewis said he shouted, "Boo!"
The Police Department declined to comment on the incident, and Lewis has been unable to explain his
behavior. However, his mother remembered telling officers that he had just been released from a mental
hospital.
Because Lewis had "struggled" with the officers, according to the police report, added to his attemptedmurder charges were simple assault, aggravated assault, reckless endangerment, and resisting arrest.
Unable to make the 10 percent bond on his $75,000 bail, Lewis, 20, was transferred to county jail.
Months in jail
In late April, after two months at the Philadelphia Industrial Correctional Center, on State Road, Lewis,
sitting in the visiting room, wearing an orange prison jumpsuit, seemed thoughtful, calm. He smiled often.
His face was fuller. His dreadlocks were gone.
"I just thank God I'm still here."
Awaiting his preliminary hearing on attempted-murder charges, he said, he had spent his time watching the
news, playing basketball, scoring in the card game Casino, and reading a Bible in his "hut," a cell he shared
with another inmate. Once a week, he attended Bible study.
With his prison case manager - the city's social-service provider of last resort - he had set immediate goals
for if and when he was released: Get a driver's license, get his stomach checked. Most important, find a job.
"Why didn't I do these things sooner?" he said.
As he pulled a Jolly Rancher candy from his white sock, he talked about lessons learned.
"I believe, every day, you have a chance to walk down a straight path. I realize now that taking one wrong
turn just leads to another."
Within the concrete walls, even his dreams had found limits. He believed that, until he found a job, he could
easily work a hot-dog stand on Broad Street in summer, shovel snow in winter.
"There's a thousand hustles out here. I can hustle anything, something positive. I've always been an
entrepreneur."
He saw real estate in his future and considered going back to Brooklyn to learn the business from his
grandfather. Although part of him wanted to find his own way.
His friends had been a disappointment - none visited him in jail.
"She's my true family," he said of his mother. "She worked hard for me. And I see she was so right about
everything."
In May, prosecutors withdrew the charge of attempted murder against Lewis. For the third time, no
witnesses had shown up at his preliminary hearing.
Lewis later pleaded guilty to the resisting-arrest charge, the lesser of the related charges, and was released
on six months' parole, less time served.
On July 1, having lost its state funding, the PIRIS program shut down, leaving a bigger void for gunshot
victims like Lewis.
A summer of trying
Lewis spent the summer at home, seeing doctors, eating his mom's savory cooking, and thinking about
what was next.
He was nervous about going out and hated riding the bus, being anywhere there were crowds. His
therapist, whom he saw every other week, told him he might be experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder.
Lewis bristled whenever his mother stuffed money in his pocket, even for the smallest thing, like a pack of
cigarettes. She urged him to be patient as he grew ever more eager for a job. He later considered enrolling
in Job Corps, a free federal education and job-training program for youth.
His mother also contemplated change. "I have to stop bringing up his past," she said. "I have to give him a
fresh start. How can he change if I keep bringing up his past?"
Lewis thought a lot about his father, whom he hadn't seen since he was 3. With his parole completed, he
considered the possibility of visiting him in Jamaica.
"I just want to be able to meet him," Lewis said. "I got a lot of questions, like, 'What happened? Why were
you never there? And what would you do to change the situation, to try to work something out where you're
in my life?' "
By mid-September, two years after Lewis had first been shot, his life had come full circle. On a mild
Thursday afternoon, his mother came through the front door of their Juniata Park home, cradling bags of
groceries.
As she put the food away, his sister sat in a chair in the living room, pencil in hand, biting her lip over her
homework. On the other side of the modest room, his brother and a friend pointed and laughed at the
television. And within the pace, within the din, Leroy Lewis sat on the couch, his head down, staring into
nothing.