Daily News | After a Philadelphia mother lost her son to gun violence, she blamed one person
Andrea Robinson is brutally honest about the person responsible for helping lead her son to the streets that eventually cost him his life: her.
Robinson, a mother of five, loved her son, Jermaine. She’s mourned her firstborn every day since he was shot multiple times on the 3500 block of Emerald Street two springs ago. one recent Saturday afternoon, I knew not to look for her son’s image among the dozen or so photographs of shooting victims that were on display inside.
“I refuse to post my son,” she said, referring to putting his image on social media sites or other forums. “I refuse to put up a poster, a picture, or wear a shirt with his face on it. My son was a trap boy” — a drug dealer — “and I used to go to the drug blocks” and chase him away.To display his photo as even an honorary gesture, she told me at the church, would not just be dishonest but potentially dangerous.
She drove around in “johnnies” — stolen cars. She wore clothes and jewelry that had been shoplifted. All the while, she told her children, “Do as I say, not as I do.” Her life was a messy tangle of contradictions.And, at the end of the day, the lessons that stuck most with Jermaine involved what he saw, not what she said.
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