The Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page is only updated Monday through Friday,^[1]With Monday, October 11^th being a government holiday, Columbus Day, it is possible that the website will not be updated until Tuesday. during “normal business hours,” so it still states that ‘just’ 427 people have been murdered in the City of Brotherly Love so far this year, but The Philadelphia Inquirer has the story of the killing of at least the 428^th:

A 13-year-old boy was fatally shot on his way to school in North Philly, police say

The victim, whom police did not immediately identify, was shot once in the chest on the 3100 block of Judson Street just after 9 a.m., police said.

by Chris Palmer and Anna Orso | Friday, October 8, 2021

A 13-year-old boy was fatally shot on his way to school Friday morning in North Philadelphia, according to police and School District officials — another bleak example of how the city’s ongoing gun violence crisis is leaving a record number of young people dead or wounded.

The victim, whom authorities declined to identify, was shot once in the chest on the 3100 block of Judson Street just after 9 a.m., police said. He was taken to Temple University Hospital, where he was pronounced dead about 20 minutes later.

Chief Inspector Frank Vanore said detectives believe the boy and several other young people had been sitting in a car parked on the block when at least one gunman walked up and fired shots into it.

Lunette Ray, 86, heard the shots — at least 10 — right outside her house. She peered out the window and saw several boys jump out of a vehicle and run away. One was severely bleeding and fell in the street. She called 911.

There’s more at the Inquirer’s original. A photo in the article shows a maroon PT Cruiser sitting parked on North Judson Street at the intersection with West Clearfield Street, with bullet holes in the windshield. However, the Inquirer’s headline, that the victim was “on his way to school” appears to be misleading:

Vanore said some neighbors said the car had been parked on the block for “quite awhile,” so it was not clear if any of the people inside had been able to drive it.

If the victim was shot “just after” 9:00 AM, it would seem that he wasn’t actually on his way to school. The Rhodes Elementary School website states that “All students must be in homerooms by 8:45 am each day.”

This was a targeted killing, though it is entirely possible, and perhaps probable, that the murdered boy wasn’t the intended target, that someone else in the vehicle was.

We have frequently noted that the inquirer only covers homicides when the victim is an ‘innocent,’ a ‘somebody,’ or a cute little white girl. At least someone in that vehicle wasn’t exactly an innocent, but I have to ask: just what were “several” young people doing sitting in a parked car, at 9:00 AM on a school day? Many things could be speculated, which I will leave up to the reader.

Chris Palmer and Anna Orso, the article authors, perhaps accidentally, stepped away from the Inquirer’s position that it’s all about guns:

Carl Day, an antiviolence advocate and pastor whose church is two blocks from where the shooting took place, said, “We should be stirred up right now, all of us.” The killing is a mandate for adults in the community, he said, to reach out to more children and teenagers and provide alternatives to violence.

“We in this community and in this zip code need to put all hands on deck,” he said. “We have to let our youth know this doesn’t have to be life. This world is so much bigger than what they think they see in front of them.”

Pastor Day spoke a truth that the #woke of the Inquirer’s newsroom don’t want to hear, that the problem of homicide in the City of Brotherly Love isn’t about guns, but about bad people, about people who think that killing others is perfectly OK, that killing other people is a reasonable and logical thing to do, for whatever reasons they have. The current generation of kids in Philly have already been lost; it’s going to be up to the next group of parents to start bringing up their children in a manner in which they don’t see killing as a reasonable thing to do, and don’t see drugs as a smart thing to take.

It’s a pretty sad thing to note that murder and death are common risks for 13-year-olds like the victim in this story, but the reality is that they are, and they are due to the aggregate behavior of other teenagers in neighborhoods like North Judson and West Clearfield Streets. The victim in this story may or may not have been doing anything wrong, but enough of his peers have been, and are, that the danger is created for all of them.