By Alex Gecan
Laura Gravenhise was returning home from the grocery store Monday evening when her son was shot right in front of her.
Hakeem Gravenhise, 16, of 2069 Union Street, was shot multiple times shortly after 6:00 P.M., according to police. He was transported to Brookdale University Hospital and Medical Center where he was pronounced dead on arrival.
Laura Gravenhise, a United States postal worker, could clearly see Hakeem, standing next to a lamppost on the corner of Union Street and Sutter Avenue. “His back was to me,” she said. “My horn was broke and I was rolling down the window when the shots started.” She wanted to get his attention so that he would help her with the groceries.
Laura reacted to the gunfire by ducking for cover. She didn’t see her son retreat into their building. She got a look at the shooters—five or six of them, she said—but couldn’t make out any faces or details, because they were running away before she got a chance to focus on them.
Recovering her equilibrium, Laura concluded that Hakeem had fled up Union Street. “He could run fast,” she said of Hakeem, who was a small forward for his school’s basketball team and also a defensive tackle during football season.
She went inside herself, intending to check on her daughter and niece and tell them there had been a shooting, she said. She said that she called Hakeem’s cell phone repeatedly, trying to get hold of him.
But when she got inside her apartment, she found her son dying. He had made it to their second-story apartment before collapsing and telling his sister and cousin “I’ve been shot,” said Laura.
Laura said that Hakeem had been on his way to run an errand for her niece and that the shooting happened so quickly that she couldn’t make out any details. “I just saw a bunch of boys running, and my boy was one of them,” she said. “I just didn’t know he was hit.”
Shaking her head, she said, “I couldn’t protect my son.”
Hakeem had been a jovial teenager. “He was a jokester,” said Laura. “He just didn’t know when to stop, even when you wanted to be serious with him.” Besides sports, Hakeem also dabbled in rap music, but not on a serious level. He had just started getting into it, his mother said, and hadn’t joined a group or started one of his own.
Hakeem’s real passion was drawing. “He wanted to be an architect,” said Laura. He could draw almost anything, she said, but he had a particular knack for characters. “He could draw your face if you just hold still,” she said. She lamented that he had not had an opportunity to “do much in life.”
She said that she didn’t know who, if anyone, would have wanted to kill her son, or even anyone with whom he’d fought. She said that he was reserved, but that she had nieces and nephews with whom Hakeem socialized.
Several teenagers, hanging around the stoop of the Gravenhises’ building or by the lamppost where his mother last saw him standing, said they knew Hakeem “from the block,” but none—not even a young man who identified himself as Hakeem’s cousin—had anything specific to say about him.
The police had no new leads in the shooting on Wednesday.
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