How could two teenage boys shoot a sleeping baby, Kimberly Anderson was still wondering a couple of days after hearing gunshots and a distraught, wailing mother outside her home here.
Since Thursday morning, when a 14-year-old and a 17-year-old allegedly shot 13-month-old Antonio Santiago, Anderson and others in the usually quiet neighborhood in this coastal city have been trying to wrap their minds around a senseless crime that has been played out over and over in the media.
Anderson was the first person to arrive at what would become an unspeakably grim crime scene near the edge of her yard after hearing gun shots and Sherry West screaming that her baby had been shot.
“I don’t think I’ve processed the whole thing,” Anderson said Saturday.
Time is not making it any easier, either.
In Brunswick, a town of 15,000 residents off I-95 in southeast Georgia near St. Simons Island, neighbors initially shared rumors about who was responsible and feared how the community would react. After Brunswick police announced Friday the arrest on murder charges of De’marquis Elkins, 17, and a 14-year-old whose name was not released, anger continued to simmer over the brutality of an infant shot to death in his stroller.
Police had few new details to share Saturday about the suspects or what happened.
But a harrowing recording of 911 calls obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution recounts a frenetic scene in which an unidentified man describes a baby “shot between the eyes.”
In interviews with the AJC and other media, Antonio’s parents have expressed outrage.
West said the two teenagers approached her asking for money. When she told them she had none, the older teen pulled out a gun, she said.
West said he pointed the gun at the ground and pulled the trigger but nothing happened. Then he pointed the gun at her and pulled the trigger again and that time a bullet grazed her left ear. She said he shot her a second time in the left thigh and asked if she wanted him to kill her baby. She told him again that she had no money, and that is when Antonio was shot while he slept in his stroller, she said.
“We are looking for additional evidence (and) aggressively looking for a weapon,” said Officer Todd Rhodes, spokesman for the Brunswick Police Department.
The randomness of the shooting has shaken the neighborhood, which is a mix of abandoned and renovated antique homes.
There was a memorial of stuffed animals, candles, balloons and a pillow with “now I lay me down to sleep” in cross stitch. But when the rain started early Saturday afternoon, Wally Mathis collected all the items except for a bouquet of flowers and delivered them to Antonio’s father, Luis Santiago, who was arrested and jailed briefly after the shooting when his grief overwhelmed him and he began screaming at West, blaming her for their son’s death.
“I’m not upset with the boys,” Santiago said Saturday of the two teenagers charged with killing his son. “They didn’t have a good upbringing.”
He has lots of questions, but they are mostly for West. “Why did you go that way?” Santiago asked. He said he frequently told her to take another route when she walked their son in a neighborhood that has public housing projects on each end of the street.
Does he blame West? “Hell, yes, I do,” Santiago said.
But it’s the accused killers who are to blame, neighbors said, and what makes it even harder to understand is their ages.
At first, Anderson said, she was sad when she thought about “children killing children.” Then someone sent her a link to the suspect Elkin’s Facebook page (since taken down) on which he boasted, using a racial slur, that he and his friends would “turn your neighborhood into a murder scene.”
“That infuriates me,” Anderson said. “How can he be so callous? How can you have a family of your own and be raised by a mother and have no regard for human life? He was looking for it. When he left with a gun, he had every intention of shooting somebody.”
Anderson said that realization tested her as a recovering alcoholic. The first call she made when she got home after talking to police was to her sponsor at Alcoholics Anonymous, Anderson said, to fight against the “resentment and fear” that could have pushed her to take a drink.
She went to a meeting instead.
Alisha Jones walked two of her children down the street to look at the memorial to Antonio Saturday morning so she could answer her girls’ questions.
“It makes you wonder what their home life is like. Why they thought it was OK to carry a gun,” Jones said, sitting on a porch within sight of the corner where the toddler was shot.
“‘Those bad people who did this thing need to have the same thing happen to them,’” Jones said her 8-year-old daughter said. “I said, ‘Gabrielle, we don’t do that. They have to go to court.’”
But she said she worries about the attackers’ apparent lack of understanding about the value of human life.
Katherine Colicchil was keeping detailed notes in a spiral notebook for a letter she plans to send her 21-year-old daughter in California who, Colicchil said, thinks she’s invincible. Colicchil is especially worried because her 20-year-old niece was shot and killed by a 14-year-old robbing a dry cleaners in the early 1990s.
“It hits home,” Colicchil said.
The slain child’s mother, West, spent time Saturday gathering up her son’s things — some to be donated and some to be packed away. The boy who loved Mickey Mouse and fried chicken was cremated, and West had them dispose of the ashes.
“I couldn’t stand the thought of seeing him in a box,” West said. The last time she saw her son was when he was put in an ambulance.
West said she wants to go home soon to New Jersey, where she has two brothers and a daughter — even though it’s where another son of hers was stabbed to death at age 18 five years ago.
“The 17-year-old shot my baby,” West said, sitting in her living room with two neighbors there for comfort. “I hope he dies like my baby died.”
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