Mom of shot-to-death Brooklyn teen was planning move to escape gun violence
The mother of a teen shot to death on a Brooklyn street just weeks before his graduation said she had been trying to get him out of town before it was too late.
Jeremiah Griffiths, 18, was set to graduate from James Madison High School this month when he shot in the head on Myrtle Ave. and Tompkins Ave. in Bedford-Stuyvesant while out celebrating Memorial Day.
'I wanted to get him out of here so bad. I did,' Jeremiah's devastated mother, Vanessa Victor, 37, told the Daily News in an exclusive interview. 'Because gun violence here is left and right. All we would do is make plans of how we're leaving Brooklyn.'
Jeremiah clung to life for two days before dying at Kings County Hospital on May 28.
'The older he got, the quicker I wanted to get him out of Brooklyn,' his mother said. 'It was hard for me to pick up and leave because my daughter's school's here, his school's there, my job is here and I myself am finishing school in November.'
But that didn't stop the family from coming up with a way out.
'We had a plan,' Victor said. 'He was going to graduate and go to the military or go away to college or graduate and stay here for a little bit — and after I graduate, we would move out of the state and purchase a home somewhere. That was our plan.'
'I don't think Brooklyn is a good environment for young Black boys,' she added. 'I wanted to get him out of here either way, to college, just away. We didn't have time to.'
No neighborhood is safe, she said, not the Bedford-Stuyvesant area where Jeremiah was killed nor Marine Park where he lived with his single parent mother. Victor said her son was visiting friends throwing Memorial Day barbecues and had plans to see a girl that night.
She said the deadly shooting was caught on video but that she refuses to watch it, relying instead on descriptions from friends, family and detectives.
'He was just walking. He was with a young lady,' Victor said. 'They said he was looking down on his phone. I was told that there were multiple gunshots fired, and one hit him, hit him in the head. And they said in the video it looked like he was about to run but he fell straight to the ground.'
There have been no arrests.
Victor was at a Starbucks down the block from her home with her daughter, who she was going to bring to a carnival, when her RIng doorbell alerted her that cops were at her door.
'I automatically did a U-turn and came right back and met them here and that's when they told me, in front of his sister,' she said. 'My first question to them was, 'How bad is it?' And they said, 'It's not too good,' and that he was in critical care at Kings County Hospital. So I just immediately ran over there. I couldn't even talk to them. His sister was in shock as well.'
Two days later he died.
'He was very funny and charismatic, that was his personality,' his mother said. 'He knew how to make people laugh. He played sports. He played basketball. He played football at his school. Everyone that came across him loved him. He always did extracurricular programs. There would be little job programs where he would get job training and things like that. He would do things like that after school. He was loved. He was loved.'
A GoFundMe was launched to help Jeremiah's family with funeral expenses and rebuilding their lives.
'Things as simple as just ordering food is weird,' she said. 'Like yesterday, I was ordering for my daughter and I and it's just weird to not ask him what he wants. It's just always been that way. So it's different. I guess as I come across things is when it hits me that he's not here anymore.'
Victor has only begun to fathom a future without her son.
'I raised him as a single parent and we kind of grew up together because I had him at 20 years old,' she said. 'And I just tried to put him in good schools and good neighborhoods. He wanted to go away to the military. That was the plan. He was supposed to be graduating. He was still researching what he wanted to do but the plan was for him to go away to the military and get out of here.'
'I just really want them to catch who did this,' she added.
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