Hello all... I just received this email from a Zeta Phi alum. His line brother is the father of the young man in this article. Please keep brother Bryant Spry in your prayers.
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Posted on Mon, Nov. 28, 2005
Mistaken Identity
As investigation into teen's shooting continues, police say, "There's no indication he was the intended target."
By DANA DiFILIPPO
difilid@phillynews.com
Michelle Kerr Spry wanted her boy home.
But at 18, Blain Spry wanted to make his own decisions. The West Mount Airy teen had spent two nights at the Northeast Philadelphia home of an old school buddy, and wanted to stay for another night.
When his mother came to retrieve him despite his objections, an argument erupted, a fight familiar to parents of teenagers everywhere.
“He got in the car and said: ‘You treat me like a baby! I’m a grown man,’” Kerr Spry recalled of the Sept. 19 encounter. “I just wanted him home — he’d been gone awhile. But I just said: ‘Fine, go.’ And he got out of the car and left.”
It was the last time she saw her son alive.
Blain died in a blaze of bullets the next night outside a Northeast Philadelphia corner store. Police believe that the shooter was out to avenge an earlier fight on the same corner that did not involve Blain.
“There’s no indication he was the intended target,” said Detective Carl Watkins of the homicide unit. “He was an innocent victim, in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
The pain is almost too much to bear for Kerr Spry, who lost her only brother two years ago in a still-unsolved homicide in East St. Louis, Ill.
“My brother’s death devastated us. This with Blain is just unreal,” said Spry, who is raising her brother’s son, 16, along with Blain’s siblings, Jordan, 15, and Grier, 12.
Almost 15 percent of this year’s 346 homicide victims were 18 or younger, according to police data.
Just 1.4 percent of the 99 cases cleared through September were attributed to killers unknown to the victim. But the incidence of homicide by strangers is probably higher, because murders by strangers are harder to solve, and 64.8 percent of the 281 homicides through September are unsolved or have not yet resulted in arrest, according to police data.
Kerr Spry and her husband, Bryant, moved their family from Illinois to Philadelphia when Blain was 11. Although he excelled in middle school, Blain struggled in city high schools, transferring twice before enrolling in the Pittsburgh Job Corps at the start of his senior year, his mother said.
“He wasn’t happy in a classroom setting,” she said. “He liked working with his hands, so we thought the Job Corps was a good fit.”
Blain bloomed in the Job Corps, where he completed a carpentry program in early September. He planned to work this fall before enrolling in college in January to study architecture.
The weekend before he died, Blain decided to visit his friend Anthony Kernizan, 20, a former classmate.
“We was just chillin’,” Kernizan said of the friends’ time together. The buddies went to a West Philadelphia club to see another friend. Later, back in Kernizan’s neighborhood, they met some girls from around the corner and stayed up all night talking.
Later that weekend, the friends spent hours tinkering with Kernizan’s car, which had been acting up but was running. The following Monday, frustrated and unable to fix it, they took the car to a garage. On the way home, at about 8:45 p.m., Kernizan saw a pay phone outside a corner store at F Street and Roosevelt Boulevard, and he stopped to phone his mother and report the mechanic’s diagnosis.
Blain said he’d wait in the car.
But seconds later, Kernizan saw Blain get out and jog over to the alley near Herkness Street behind the store. Kernizan didn’t call to his friend, figuring he just needed to relieve himself.
That’s a decision he now regrets.
“We heard the shots, but we ain’t hear where it was coming from,” Kernizan remembered. “Blain came running from the alley. I thought he was running away from the sound, but then he collapsed in front of me and I knew then he got hit.”
Kernizan ran to his friend and tried to stop the bleeding, as a crowd gathered.
Paramedics rushed Blain to Albert Einstein Medical Center, but doctors could do little to repair the gaping wounds to his chest, neck and left arm. Blain was pronounced dead at 10:20 p.m.
Watkins, the homicide investigator, suspects that there were several witnesses — to both Blain’s slaying and the earlier fight. Some witnesses reported having seen a dark-colored vehicle flee the scene with a gunman in the passenger side and a female driver.
“We really just need people to come forward,” Watkins said.
Kerr Spry still can’t believe her son is gone and often speaks of him in the present tense.
She proudly recalls his passion for artwork — pencil portraits and abstracts mostly — that drove his desire to be an architect. An amateur rapper, Blain often penned his own lyrics and recorded in friends’ studios.
He also was an athletic kid, with skating, skiing and fishing among his favorite sports. His family will dedicate a memorial bench in his honor in Carpenter’s Woods near the time of Blain’s birthday in March.
“Every day you find one of his hats or one of his sneakers, or you get his mail. Every day, there’s this new pain and another reminder that he’s not going to be around,” Kerr Spry said.
“I still don’t believe my beautiful baby is not here. He is such a gift, so smart. It’s just unreal that I’m not going to have a conversation with him anymore, or that we’re not going to see him drawing, or writing down some lyrics. He’s 18 with a future as bright as anyone I know, and it’s gone.”
Prayer for Zeta Phi Alum...
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