MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) - Helen and Ty’Riq - they had their future all laid out.
He was going to take her to her senior prom, and he was going to be there to watch her walk across the same stage he’d crossed two years prior. They were counting the days until she’d become the first person in her family to graduate, and then the first to go on to college.
School wasn’t something Helen Brown had always taken seriously, but her godmother put her on the right path and Ty’Riq Moon religiously encouraged her. They were preparing for their lives together.
All of that was shattered one month into her senior year.
Five days before his 21st birthday, Moon was fatally shot in a McDonald’s parking lot after leaving a high school football game. He became one of 46 homicides in Montgomery County in 2019; one of 21 victims who were younger than age 30.
“I didn’t believe it until I seen him,” Brown said of Moon. “I went to the crime scene. I saw his brains. I saw his blood.”
A PATH TO SUCCESS RIDDLED WITH LIFE-ALTERING EXPERIENCES
Brown started her senior year with plans to go on to Tuskegee University. She’d spent the summer working night shifts - with one car, her mom would wake in the middle of the night to pick Brown up from her job. She was saving for her own car.
Her plans for Tuskegee were inspired by her godmother, Porscha Echols who her little sister is named after.
“She helped me with school. She helped me get closer to God. She changed my life. She kept me on track. She was a huge help,” Brown said.
Echols was strangled to death by her foster son. Brown was a sophomore at the time.
“That was crazy, too,” Brown said of Echols’ murder.
“I could deal with it, and I could go on,” she said about that pain.
But, so much changed after Moon’s death.
Like so many other young people in Montgomery, Brown’s path toward success has been riddled with life-altering experiences, with little time between each. In such a short life, she’s experienced a kind of ongoing trauma that few adults can imagine. She’s been forced to consistently and consciously make the decision to ignore her pain in order to focus on taking the next steps toward achieving her goals.
After Moon died, she couldn’t stop thinking about all the nights he’d chat with her on Facetime as she fell asleep. She couldn’t stop carrying the stuffed frog he had given her; it was the first Valentine’s Day present she’d ever received.
The two met during her first year of high school. He radiated confidence, and she knew who she was, too. He lived life to the fullest and she fed off his energy. They’d go on to take dozens of pictures and videos of themselves together during the next few years - often with big smiles, sometimes while joking, others while wrestling.
Those who were with Moon the night of his death, one of whom has been arrested in connection to the killing, continued to hang out in her neighborhood. She saw their faces but couldn’t see his, and she couldn’t figure out how to contain her anger, how she could continue living among them.
When she tried to return to school two weeks after his death, she didn’t last an hour before staff called to have her mom pick her up.
Before, “I didn’t have to worry about anything. I’m not saying my life is perfect, but it wasn’t nothing that I couldn’t get up and go to school. It was stuff you could get past,” Brown said.
If she’d given up, many would understand why. Even she questioned whether or not she could go on, whether or not she’d make it to the finish line.
LIFE IN A VIOLENT COMMUNITY IS ‘TRAGIC AND HARD’
Moon’s was the second dead body she’d seen. The first was about three months before. Walking to get her hair done at a nearby apartment, she spotted a man lying dead in the street. He had been shot on that hot summer day.
Sitting on her cousin’s porch up the street from hers, she shook her head, trying to explain the grief she was carrying and would continue to carry.
“Tragic,” Brown described life. “Tragic and hard. It’s just unbelievable. It’s confusing.”
Raised in Gibbs Village, a housing project in west Montgomery infamous as a hotbed for violence, Brown and her siblings grew up unable to play beyond their front yard.
“The park is across the street from our house and we couldn’t even go to the park,” Brown recalled.
Brown’s goal of going to college and joining the medical field would be an anomaly in her neighborhood, where fewer than 10% of people older than 25 hold bachelor’s degrees and about 56% live below the poverty level. Fewer than half have a high school diploma.
From the start, she’d have mile-high barriers to overcome, beyond the trauma she would endure. She was just 9 when the 2011 double homicide of Jaderico Langford and Deswana Gregory created a sense of extreme fear across the community. Hundreds of bullets rang out that day, people recall.
While some years were better than others, gun violence has continued to be a prominent part of life in her neighborhood. In a single week in 2019, Gibbs’ residents endured three shootings, two of them fatal.
The who, what and why spread like wildfire from neighbor to neighbor, with conversations routinely focused on the dead. At times, those deaths were captured on social media. Brown has been raised in a time when these moments aren’t just replayed in one’s memory, but literally thanks to social media posts.
‘I’M THE ONLY PERSON I KNOW GOT MY BACK’
Brown found out about Moon’s death while scrolling through Facebook. Someone was live, talking about a shooting at McDonald’s. Someone else tagged her boyfriend. She called his phone, he didn’t pick up. She went live herself, her viewers watching as she screamed outside her home late in the night, asking God to make it untrue.
“I thought it was a joke, like I honestly thought it was a joke,” she said.
The next day, “I just broke down,” Brown said after waking up from a nap and realizing he was still gone.
“My body was hot. They had to keep fanning me, giving me water and everything. I had never cried like that,” she said.
As the months went by, the breakdowns would add up.
In October, “I had a terrible, terrible breakdown. It was like I was going crazy. I just started thinking about him. I don’t talk to people. He was the only person I had, the only person I talked to. I’m just lost,” Brown said. “I’m so lonely.”
She contemplated home school, but, “I talked to him and asked if he thought I should stay and I guess he wanted me to,” Brown said, referring to Moon.
She got in the habit of asking what he’d want for her. He’d witnessed her strength and endurance - aspects of her character that are impressive not just because of her age, but by all standards. She couldn’t bring herself to let him down.
She’d missed her scheduled ACT exam and she missed the deadline to get her photo in the yearbook. She was in co-op, meaning she needed a job to get her school credits, but application after application went unanswered.
“I don’t (stay focused),” she said after going back to school. With his obituary in the front cover of her binder, his photo on her phone case, a ‘T’ charm on her necklace, “It’s so hard. It’s so different,” she said.
Her losses caused a resistance to letting people in - already weighed down by so much, she couldn’t risk being caused any more pain. Others could fail her, or they could leave her.
She often says she has no friends.
“I walk around with a smile, but it’s so much pain behind this smile. … I cry on my own shoulder and I’m the only person I know I got my back,” she posted.
“Knowing I can’t call him and I don’t have no one else to call, that’s not easy to deal with,” she said.
LIFE GOES ON FOR HELEN, BUT THE CYCLE OF VIOLENCE CONTINUES
Her strength may still waiver, but Brown’s determination to bring home a diploma did not. For her, the steps on the ladder to this achievement seemed to have been replaced with the blades of sharp knives, her hands covered in blood as she climbed to the top.
“I’m going to finish. I know that for a fact. And I’m going to finish because that’s what he was waiting on,” Brown said about halfway through the year.
A job at Walmart came along, followed by a second job at McDonald’s a couple months later. She wrote a poem honoring Moon and Echols, reciting it during a February school assembly.
“God does everything for a reason so I don’t ask why, but he took two important people from me and until this day I wonder why,” she wrote.
She kept her composure in class, tapping her feet while trying to understand x-intercepts and the differences between synthetic and long division. She ordered a necklace with Moon’s face on it. She shared the photos his family took when visiting Moon’s grave and the Facebook memories of them that have popped up throughout the year.
With a smile on her face, Brown shared selfies and videos of herself with family members. But when another girl at school lost her brother and tried to act like she was fine, Brown let her know she knew she was not.
“You don’t know pain until you’re staring at yourself in the mirror with tears in your eyes, begging yourself to just hold on and be strong,” one of her posts stated.
Brown picked up her cap and gown. She struggled with the fact that her mom was undergoing surgery in a Birmingham hospital and wouldn’t be able to see her graduate.
Quite literally, “It’s one thing after another, after another, after another,” she said.
Please pray for my mom, she asked.
At the start of her graduation, the sound of sirens filled the air around her high school as police cars raced by. Five people would be shot in separate shootings over five hours that day - two of them fatally. Like Moon, both men were younger than 30.
After getting her diploma, Brown went straight to the Montgomery Memorial Cemetery. She parked the car next to Moon’s grave, where the grass still hadn’t grown back.
A photo of his smiling face marks the plot. With Mariah Carey’s “Bye Bye” playing in the background, she knelt down to pose for a picture with it - even though he couldn’t come to the ceremony, there would still be a photo of them together with her in a cap and gown.
She needed him to know that she’d made it. She wished she could hear him say, “I’m proud.”
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