Parents mourn a ‘fine young man’ as police search for their son’s killer
As Steve Green's family prepares for his funeral they are struggling to understand how he became a victim of the city's gun-violence crisis.
Steve Green III was an avid video gamer, a star player on his high school football and basketball teams, and a big brother who walked his younger sister to the trolley stop after school before practice, his family said.
Stevie, as they called him, had just turned 18 and had saved $1,400 toward buying his first car.
He had never been arrested. He was not a member of a street gang. He was a good kid who set his sights on enlisting in the Air Force after high school as a way to pay for college and give himself a chance to travel.
So his parents and their family and friends are devastated that their son was shot to death earlier this month not far from their home in Overbrook Farms, becoming yet another victim of Philadelphia’s spiraling gun-violence crisis
Just after 7 p.m. on Saturday, April 9, Green was walking from a friend’s house in Overbrook when six teenage boys got out of a car and chased him and one opened fire ― striking him 13 times in the head, chest, and legs near the intersection of 60th Street and Clifford Terrace, police said.
First responders rushed Green to Lankenau Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead. So instead of graduating next year and setting off to fulfill his dreams, Green became one of 96 people between the ages of 13 to 19 who have been shot in the city this year, and one of 23 who died. In all, 141 people have been killed this year in the city.
In Green’s case, investigators have recovered surveillance video from the Tustin Playground that captured six young men chasing him northbound on 60th Street, then fleeing southbound on 60th Street after he fell to the ground, Philadelphia Homicide Capt. Jason Smith said.
Two days after the shooting, one suspect, 17-year-old Gary Taylor, turned himself in, accompanied by his parents, and has been charged with murder and related crimes. Smith said police have identified two others who were involved in the shooting and are seeking warrants for their arrests. Efforts to identify Green’s other assailants continue, he said.
Taylor lives in the neighborhood, just around the corner from the playground.
Meanwhile, a family mourns.
“I want justice. I want the police to find his killer, by all means. And I want the world to know what a great young man Stevie was,” his father, Steve Jr., said in a recent interview, fighting back tears in the family’s Overbrook Farms home.
“He was an honor roll student, first. He was an athlete, point guard on the basketball team, cornerback on the football team,” the father said of his namesake son, who was a junior at Kipp DuBois Collegiate Academy in Parkside.
Steve Green Jr., his wife, Marion Toole, and relatives and friends who gathered in the family’s living room on a recent afternoon said they were pleased that police had arrested one of the teenage boys seen on surveillance videos chasing Green. They’re hopeful the others will soon be arrested.
Street talk, theories, and bits and pieces of unverified information have filtered their way about possible motives and suspects as they prepare for Green’s April 30 funeral at Sharon Baptist Church and a memorial celebration at his former middle school, Discovery Charter, said Greens father and Toole, the boy’s stepmother.
Smith, the homicide captain, said detectives have gathered information pointing to a possible motive involving a former girlfriend. He declined to elaborate.
“From my knowledge, Stevie had no problems with anybody, so we’re trying to find out what the motive was for somebody to shoot my son 15, 14, 13 times,” his father said. “Is it jealously? Is it over a girl? What is it? Why would somebody do this?”
Said Toole: “Hatred and jealously, those are the only two things that come to mind. To know Stevie and to know who he was, it can’t be anything else beyond that because he’s not a thug. He’s not in the street. If you want to hurt Stevie it’s because you want something that he has.”
The family can’t help but think that people know more about the crime than they’re saying.
“The neighborhood knows exactly who these kids are. They know the car,” said Green’s uncle, Edwin Santana. “This is a very tight neighborhood that feels trapped within that area because there’s a lot of gang violence on Lansdowne Avenue, on the right-hand side of Columbia.”
Neighbors near the crime scene provided police with doorbell camera footage despite their fears, said Green’s aunt, Sharahn Santana. Still, she said, “Many are reticent to talk because they’ve experienced a level of intimidation.”
Fear of violence and the still-at- large suspects led Green’s parents to decide against having a vigil right after his death and instead have planned to have one after the gathering at Discovery Charter, within the gated schoolyard at 4700 Parkside Ave., they said.
“Stevie was one of those young brothers who strove to fulfill his goals and to make his parents proud, and to make his sister and family proud,” Green said, breaking into sobs. “He always wanted somebody to be proud of him.
“I told him almost every day, ‘I’m raising you to be a fine young man.’ And that’s what he wanted to be, and that’s what he was.”