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A 15-year-old boy in a leather coat, sneakers and baggy jeans stands next to his mother in a windswept cemetery in late January.
About a dozen boys and girls and a high school teacher huddle beside them, heads bowed.
“I miss you, dog,” a friend whispers.
The woman, Vickie Syrus, stands silently, hands clasped in front of her. She looks down at the smooth face with the big smile staring back at her from the photo in a small oval frame in the tombstone.
Marlon LaRae Syrus
Oct. 28, 1986
Jan. 29, 2005
The teacher, Mal McCluskey, pulls a wool cap onto his shaved head and recalls some Marlonisms:
When he walked into a party, he would ask, Yo, where da girls at?
The moment someone’s wallet came out, Hey, lemme hold something.
McCluskey’s favorite: Shine your head for a nickel.
Everyone laughs, but the sound fades in the brittle air until nothing remains but the weight of Marlon’s absence.
“I’m better having known him,” McCluskey says.
Jeffery, the 15-year-old, Marlon’s younger brother, stares at the tombstone, hands deep in his pockets. He has Marlon’s high forehead, wide eyes. The same thin mustache and trimmed goatee. Jeffery has three more years of high school. He contemplates the photograph of Marlon, how he died just like that, and wonders what his own future holds.
• • •
My name is Marlon Syrus, Marlon wrote in a high school paper. I was born October 28, 1986. I have seven brothers and sisters. My mother works at KU Medical Center. I love my grandma and grandpa because they give me everything I want. I enjoy playing football and going to the movies with my friends. I like skateboarding and I like holidays, especially Christmas. I want to work in construction as I am very strong. I am very fit and like the outdoors and indoors. My family means everything to me.
In some ways, Marlon was assertive and confident, a good-humored leader. In others, he needed help to believe in his potential. He found school difficult. He was held back in the first grade. He wasn’t bad. Just needed extra help.
But being held back and labeled “special education” scarred him. I don’t belong with those kids, he’d tell his mother. He started arriving late to his classes. His grades declined. He was a loner, his father, Michael Dupree, recalls, because he could not keep up with the other kids. As he grew older, he spent more and more time away from school and on the street, where drug violence was destroying neighborhoods.
Vickie Syrus, 40, remembers the 1990s as the time crack took over Kansas City, Kan. Zombies stumbling up and down Rowland Avenue near 31st Street where she lived at the time. Shootings. Drugs no longer in the background but out in the open.
Last year, Kansas City, Kan., police reported 46 homicides, many of them drug-related.
Every day about 15 people ages 10 to 24 are killed in the United States, according to federal statistics. They are most likely to be shot.
Stay off the street, Marlon’s father had told him on Christmas Day 2004. There’s nothing out there for you.
OK, Daddy, Marlon said.
• • •
Jeffery’s father, Henry Jones, told him about Marlon the morning after he died. Stunned, angry and confused, Jeffery punched the walls. His aunt was at the house and calmed him.
Later in the day his father pulled him aside to talk. He told Jeffery that Marlon was in a better place.
Marlon was quiet, never one to start trouble, but he had seemed lost, Henry said. Marlon wanted to do right but was unable to find a way out. Of the guys he hung with, maybe one or two were in school.
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