I understand the “cycle of violence” that claims the lives of too many Black men. I understand it almost as a cliché at this point in my life. It’s an issue that has been going on well before I was born and reached a peak in my childhood which was in the early to mid 90s. “The cycle of violence” as a term is now only relegated to community activists, local politicians, and the families of homicide victims on the news. They shout it out in front of cameras while on the campaign trail or as they grieve the lives of their lost loved ones. The television audience is dismayed up until the very second that the next news story comes on about inflation, or a restaurant shuttering its doors, or a heroic dog–then it is immediately forgotten. Nothing ever happens in terms of changing the mindset in the hood or centering the problem for long enough for it to actually be solved. We just go on about our evening as if the perilous life of Black men shouldn’t be a major concern in our country. I tend to burry the pain of living in a world where I am most likely to be killed by another Black man, deep in my subconscious mind. I know it and I see it, but I try not to think about it. However, the circumstances surrounding the death of Philadelphia teen Noah Scurry has made me think about it a lot. 

It came up on my YouTube algorithm that a 17-year-old basketball star had been gunned down in the streets of North Philadelphia. It gained national attention only because he was a talented athlete and therefore supposed to be protected from young killers in the streets. The story was told in a manner designed to demonstrate how truly depraved the Black underworld has become. This innocent kid with a bright future, only months away from making it out of the hood was gunned down as he prepared to be driven to school by his mother. What kind of a person kills a teenager in front of his mom? And not just any teenager, but a basketball player!

Noah was described as exceptional by the school district spokesperson Monique Braxton. He reportedly had the highest SAT score in the school and was an outstanding student. The more they reported on his good deeds the more savage the young Black men who presumably killed him appeared to be. “No one gets a pass. Anybody can get it. Kill them all. Make they mama’s cry.” Had to be the mantra for these urchins. But then the streets started talking, and they were saying that Noah Scurry AKA Joker was not innocent but instead he was very active in street life.

 Social media has deprivatized all hood conversations. The era of having to be affiliated with a particular neighborhood in order to know who is committing robberies, who sells weed, who pimps, and who’s a killer is over. Now it’s all in online. There are YouTubers who cover hood politics in every city across the western world. And if the video has any inaccuracies, then people from that neighborhood will make corrections in the comments. To this point, I have never actually been to Philadelphia but in the days after the murder of Noah Scurry on January 14^th, 2025, I felt as connected to the Philly streets as Meek Mill and Beanie Sigel. 

Scurry, in addition to being a high school basketball player, was a rapper named JokerOTV. The day before he was killed, he had put out a rap video in a joker mask holding a gun talking about people that he had allegedly murdered. The Vlogs began to say that one of the people who Scurry killed was the son of beloved podcaster and former rapper Gillie da Kid (which was recently confirmed in an interview with Shannon Sharpe). This entire case has been extremely difficult for me to process. Indeed, it has kept me up at night. Even as the story is dying down in the blogosphere, it hasn’t relinquished in my mind.   Scurry had to be 15 when he allegedly killed Gillie’s son. He was skilled at basketball, and he paid enough attention in school to do well on his SATs but neither of those things were enough to keep him from becoming entrenched in a criminal lifestyle. It was confirmed that he had been shot and per his own admission (to the extent that one can accept rap lyrics as truth) he had shot people. The answers, it would appear, are not the answers. If school and extracurricular activities can’t save us, then what can? And why would the school district release a statement that depicted Noah Scurry as an angel when there was so much evidence that confirmed he was indeed human. He was as susceptible to the gangs in his community as anyone else. He was as tainted as we all are. He was misguided, as youth and even adults tend to be. He was trying to figure it out, but he got it wrong–all wrong. Now he lay in his casket, reunited with the Earth. His death will beget more retaliations and more trauma. 

We are all diseased. We don’t show our symptoms every day, but we are still terminally ill. The life and death of Noah Scurry has caused my sickness to flair up. It has reminded me that as hard as I have worked to become educated and somewhat successful, it really has more to do with luck than my ambition. What if I would have gotten shot as a teenager? Perhaps that would have caused me to hit the streets with all of my might and with no compassion or regard for human life. What if I saw someone get blown away as a young child? What if I had an abusive father and an emotionally unavailable mother? What if all of my uncles were in prison? What if my best friends started committing armed robberies and begged me to come with them? What if I got jumped by a group of boys from a rival neighborhood for no reason? Would I ever be to forgive them? I don’t know how many of these things happened to Scurry, but I know that even though we grew up in similar environments he was affected by it in a way that I never have been affected. Noah Scurry did not live long enough to find his purpose or to seek redemption. He did not even live long enough to go to his Senior Prom or graduate from high school. I stay up at night thinking about Noah Scurry. I wake up in the morning thinking about JokerOTV. I don’t know what could have been done to save him and that haunts me. It haunts me that we still don’t know how to stop the cycle from continuing.