By Joi-Marie McKenzie
The day after her son’s murder, Dahlia Clarke, 44, is trying to make arrangements for his funeral. She is frustrated.
“My son was just shot and killed and I was hoping to get some assistance,” she said into the telephone while pacing in her living room. The white furniture is covered in plastic. Trinkets from their Jamaican homeland hang on the wall.
“They told me to call you,” she replied to the person on the other end of the line. “I want to fly him back to Jamaica.”
Derron Clarke, 19, was shot and killed early Sunday morning in front of 1404 E. 48th St., police said. A passerby found Clarke lying on the ground with a bullet wound to his neck. He was transported to Beth Israel Hospital where he was pronounced dead on arrival.
“While he was leaving, I said, ‘Derron, give me a hug,'” recalled his mother. She added that he left the house for the last time at 6 p.m. to attend a baby shower at the home of a friend, Vernon McIntosh, who lives on Avenue K. Clarke was shot a block away from the home.
He had moved with his family from Westmoreland, Jamaica. Clarke, the youngest child of Ansel and Dahlia Clarke, along with his sisters Donna Marie and Sara Stephenson, moved nearly seven years ago. His grandmother, Enid, had come to the United States nearly 13 years earlier and wanted her family to join her.
“Derron was a very good kid,” said his mother. “He was very loving.”
But a local pastor took a harsher view. “He didn’t listen to his mother,” said Rev. Humphrey Logan, pastor of Faith Church of God in Flatlands. “She told him to stay in the house and stop running with the wrong crowd.”
Clarke was in and out of trouble since he arrived in New York. He had six sealed arrests and recently finished a stint in prison. He was released months ago, according to Rev. Logan. His mother, wanting him to get out of the neighborhood, set up a job for him in Cape Cod, Mass. Clarke was supposed to leave to start his new job the day after he was killed.
No arrests have been made and police have no suspects.
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