The what ifs come at night.</p><p>What if she had sent him to college in Tennessee like he wanted?</p><p>What if she had called him that night and told him to come home early?</p><p>What if he had eaten at home instead of going out?</p><p>Stephanie Sesley stands in the middle of her East 68th Street house and adjusts the bandanna on her head. A television plays behind her amid a tumble of boxes and plastic trash bags and little else. She plans to move. </p><p>She won’t continue living in the city where her son was shot dead in the middle of the night. But she will wait until the police catch his killer and determine why they thought they had the right to take Moody, her only child, away from her.</p><p>He was 19. His actual name was Jarod, but when he was 4 months old and got tired of playing peek-a-boo with his grandmother and turned away from her, she said, a little indignant, “Oh, he’s a moody something,” and the name stuck.</p><p>What if …?</p><p>Sesley, 39, had been on Jarod a few days before his death. He had missed enrollment at Penn Valley Community College messing around, procrastinating. </p><p>He had wanted to attend Lane College in Tennessee and had been a little angry that she wanted him to go to Penn Valley first, to better prepare him for Lane. If he did well, he could go next year, she told him. </p><p>For most of his life she had worked two jobs to support him. School. She couldn’t think of anything more important, other than voting.</p><p>I know, mama, I know, he told her before he left that night. I’ll be at Penn Valley taking math, science and speech. And I’ll vote, too.</p><p>But she knew he had other things on his mind. He had just been hired at a Wal-Mart and wanted to buy a Ford Mustang.</p><p>You haven’t even started your job yet, she told him. How are you going to pay a car note, insurance, plus your rent when you move out?</p><p>I’m not moving out. I’m not leaving you.</p><p>“He didn’t lie,” Sesley said at his memorial service. “Somebody took him.”</p><p>She sees herself again giving him money to go out and eat. She sees him walk out the door in basketball shorts and a white T-shirt. She sees him get in the front seat of his truck where two friends are waiting for him.</p><p>A car pulls up with two more friends. They all start talking and then drive down the street until she no longer sees them. She continues to hear the fading noise of their engines for a little while. And then nothing.</p><p>What if …?</p><p>She notices the obituaries in <i>The Call</i> newspaper every Friday, but it never really hit her that her son could appear in those pages as easily as other young black men. However, she did talk to Jarod about it. </p><p>She would ask: Do you think the people in the paper knew they were going to get killed? You just can’t go to a party of someone you don’t know. You can’t go to a girl’s house you don’t know in a neighborhood you don’t know. </p><p>I don’t live like that, he said. </p><p>Nowadays, she warned him, you don’t have to. It finds you.</p><p>But he was 19 and thought he was grown.</p><p>A little after 2 a.m. Aug. 30, Sesley heard gunshots coming from the adjacent block near where some of Jarod’s friends lived. She called him on his cell phone. It rang three times. She went outside but realized she had on only a nightgown. Then her phone rang. </p><p>Someone is shooting at us, one of his friends shouted into the phone.</p><p>Where’s Moody? </p><p>I don’t know.</p><p>His friends ran to her house. They were out of breath, scared, confused. Nothing happened on this block. A neighbor called police on her boyfriend once, but that was it.</p><p>Where’s Moody?</p><p>They still didn’t know. </p><p>Sesley dashed to her car and drove to the end of her street, panicked.