In the 90-second cellphone recording, Davion tugs another young man down a stoop, fists flailing like a teenage boy on the brink. His target, a man the police said was a member of the Bloods street gang, had insulted one of Davion’s best friends, Clevens Valcin, who had been killed in Flatbush days before.
The tangle was over in seconds, and the only thing wounded was pride. But that was enough. At 5 p.m. the next day, detectives said, Bloods gang members lured Davion to the same stoop and fired almost a dozen shots into his stomach. He was dead in minutes.
Davion was one of the youngest men shot and killed this year on the streets of Brooklyn, a victim of gang violence that has spiked upward in some pockets of the borough.
Twenty percent of the city’s shootings so far this year have been concentrated in just four neighborhoods in northern Brooklyn, the police said, and at least 28 of those shootings were gang related. Crown Heights, in the 77th Precinct, has been the center of the mayhem.
For his friends, Davion’s fate was all the more tragic in that he had nearly escaped it: There was the college scholarship he almost used, the short-lived move to North Carolina where he tried to start a new life and a city-funded anti-violence group that nearly succeeded in helping him escape gang life.
For four years, Davion was involved in Save Our Streets Crown Heights, one of the city’s Cure Violence groups that works directly with youth who are at risk of joining gangs.
Then his counselor left the organization in January, saying he was traumatized by the heavy workload. Davion fell out of touch and deeper into the streets. Three months later, he was dead.
“I should have been there more for him. I should have kept calling,” the counselor, Mohammed Siagha Jr., said, holding back tears at a coffee shop near Davion’s old apartment building. “They pay attention to the people who are doing really well, and the people who need help. So the people in the middle, they get lost in those cracks, like Davion.”
Born to a single mother in Crown Heights, Davion was shy and book smart, and spent his free time playing basketball at the St. John’s Recreation Center courts, friends said.
As a teenager, Davion tried to meet with his absent father, who lived nearby but had never gotten in touch. But his father shunned him, friends said, and Davion gravitated toward other older men in his apartment building on Park Place and Utica Avenue in Brooklyn.
In 2015, Davion met Damani Troutman, a pretty teenager who lived in North Carolina but spent summers in Brooklyn. The pair hit it off almost immediately. They were both 15.
“We understood each other,” Damani said. “Just two young kids growing up in the hood.”
They spent hot summer days riding the subway into Manhattan, taking nothing but a $10 bill to see how long they could make it last. They walked into the Rolex store and stared at the watches, fantasizing about buying them someday.
At night, they sneaked up to the roof of Davion’s building and watched the city lights until they fell asleep.
“Those moments were priceless, and I didn’t even know that when the moments were happening,” Damani said.
The fairy tale had a darker side. Around the same time he met Damani, Davion was introduced to Folk Nation, a national gang with roots in Chicago that some of the older men in his building had joined.
During the last decade, shootings in Crown Heights have dropped steadily, on par with the decline in violent crime across the city. In the first 6 1/2 months of this year, the neighborhood has had 15 reported shootings, down from 31 during the same time span in 2009.
Much of the stubborn violence that remains is driven by a diverse gang ecosystem, including national gangs like Folk Nation and the Bloods, and local crews that have grown out of public housing developments in Crown Heights.
Siagha, who lived in the neighborhood and knew Davion, saw his drift toward that life. Save Our Streets had helped to extricate Siagha from a gang, and he became an unofficial recruiter. He started bringing Davion along to volunteer at the group’s events, asking him to serve food or to hand out T-shirts and backpacks.
“At first I kind of had to force him to come to some events,” Siagha recalled.
It was difficult to keep Davion engaged, Siagha said, and he knew the teenager was under constant peer pressure to leave SOS behind. Still, Davion kept showing up, Siagha said.
As the city has poured billions of dollars into aggressive policing tactics, it has funneled a much smaller sum — $36 million in 2019 — to Cure Violence groups like SOS.
The money helps to pay staff members and rent, and funds events and special ceremonies that acknowledge participants who have made progress; SOS once rewarded Davion with a ticket to an amusement park.
Success rates are compelling in the small areas where the group functions: In SOS’ target zone near a notoriously violent corner of Bed-Stuy, there has not been a killing in more than a year.
Still, the groups are underfunded and understaffed for the daunting job, employees and city government officials say. The $36 million must support about 60 groups in 22 neighborhoods. SOS Crown Heights alone requires approximately $1 million annually to stay afloat, officials with the organization said.
Davion was 17 when he found out Damani was pregnant. The baby would prove to be an opportunity for Davion, who moved to North Carolina to live with Damani and her family in November 2017.
Together, away from Brooklyn, they started to build a life. Damani graduated from high school in North Carolina and enrolled in college. Both found jobs working the third shift at a Butterball turkey plant. Not long after their first child, Samir, was born in January 2018, Damani became pregnant again. Davion seemed to relish fatherhood, she said.
By spring, Davion had graduated from high school and applied to college, writing his essay on the death of a friend. He was awarded a full scholarship, Damani said, and planned to enroll in the fall. His dream was to become a forensic psychologist.
He would never get to pursue it. The couple had been paying rent to Damani’s mother, who had not paid the landlord. The entire family was evicted in the summer of 2018, and their hope of finding another apartment vanished when the landlord kept the security deposit.
Instead, they returned to New York.
Davion arrived back in Brooklyn that summer disheartened and depressed. His old building had been bought by a developer and gutted in the wave of gentrification sweeping Crown Heights. His closest friends were leaving for college. By October, Damani moved to a homeless shelter in Manhattan with their children while she and Davion awaited placement in public housing.
Barred from living with Damani by the shelter — a neighbor had filed a since-dismissed complaint with the Administration for Children’s Services after the couple had an argument, Damani said — Davion began sleeping on friends’ couches in Crown Heights. Not long after, he got a job at 7-Eleven.
But his world was changing. On his days off, while Damani was in Manhattan, he spent time with old friends from the street and went back to what he knew: Folk Nation.
When Siagha heard that Davion was back in town, he was immediately worried. Davion had just about made it out, but the brief respite in North Carolina had not been long enough.
“To get fully out, you have to do years out,” Siagha said. “You can get caught up in these streets fast.”
Siagha, too, was struggling. He had taken a full-time job at SOS in February 2018, but was overwhelmed and the group was restructuring. He left not long after Davion’s return to Brooklyn.
That summer had been a quiet one in Crown Heights; by July, there had been just one murder in the 77th Precinct. That would change by January of this year, when the neighborhood was hit with a surge in violence so significant that the police scrambled to contain it.
Siagha last spoke to Davion in early April, right after Valcin, who was known as “Lefty,” was killed in Flatbush. The tragedy rattled Davion, but he told Siagha he was coping.
It was partly true. Davion was keeping busy with work at 7-Eleven, and had made an appointment to pick up his high school transcripts in Brooklyn, hopeful that his college dream was still possible.
Privately, he was unraveling. He struggled to navigate the city’s bureaucracy by himself, and his 1-year-old and newborn were in a shelter an hour away by subway.
The night of April 14, Davion sobbed for hours in Damani’s arms. He told her he was terrified of the summer’s potential for violence. Hours later, he got into the fight at the St. John’s stoop.
“I don’t think that was just over Lefty,” Damani said. “He was reaching his breaking point.”
On April 16, Davion dropped Samir with Damani’s cousin, and before going to work, he stopped by the stoop. Though he was in Folk Nation, he had always been friendly with the Bloods crew that was known to control the area — a benefit of having grown up nearby.
Detectives have said they think Davion may have been lured there that day by the boys he had fought with a day earlier. The motive, detectives said, would be typical of the violence rending Crown Heights: Davion had “disrespected” them by beating up one of their members. Bolstering that theory, Davion appeared relaxed in his final moments, the police said. He seemed to have no idea that an ambush was imminent.
Whether Siagha and SOS could have saved Davion is impossible to say. For proponents of Cure Violence programs, he’s a tragic example of its limitations.
“At the end of the day, this is sort of like a business. There’s still budgets, there’s still deadlines,” Siagha said. “That doesn’t work in the streets.”
In the days following Davion’s death, Damani moved into her grandfather’s home in Bushwick with Samir and Supreme, who is 6 months old. A month later, the balloons Davion had bought for her 19th birthday still floated at the ceiling.
She and her children are now in a shelter in Manhattan awaiting placement in public housing. She has enrolled in the Borough of Manhattan Community College for the fall.
“I just wish we could’ve made it,” she said. “To see the better life that we always talked about and planned on seeing.”
Her fear, she said, is that Davion will be remembered only as a gang member in Brooklyn. He was a dedicated father, she said, and a smart young man who under different circumstances might have flourished.
“He didn’t just wake up and say, ‘I want to be in a gang,’” she said. “It’s way deeper than people think it is.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.