As I was having lunch today I opened up the local section in the paper and read this. What a bright future she would have had. I was sad and teared up and felt angry that such a young life was taken away. I didn't know her but I felt empty after this. Why do we do this to our selves why do we kill for dumb reasons. RIP.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/03/21/BAGIROOV051.DTL
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/03/21/BAGIROOV051.DTL
SAN FRANCISCO
Slain teen had made right choices
College-bound girl, 17, killed outside Bayview youth center had excelled, avoided trouble
Jaxon Van Derbeken, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Antwanisha Morgan was making the right choices, having learned from her family's struggles as she grew up in San Francisco's troubled Bayview.
The 17-year-old was set to graduate from South San Francisco High School in June. She had spent four years preparing for college. She was about to go on a bus tour to check out universities in the South.
But her promising life was cut short when she was gunned down outside a Bayview community youth center where she and her brother had been Friday night, an innocent victim of apparent gang violence, police say.
The 8:11 p.m. shooting occurred 11 minutes after she left the youth services program at Bayview Hunters Point Foundation for Community Improvement, where her family said she was a volunteer.
Investigators say someone emerged from a car and opened fire, hitting her in the chest as she stood at Third Street and Quesada Avenue.
Her family remembered "Nisha,'' as she was known, as a 5-foot-1 dynamo who dreamed of becoming an actress but wanted to go to college to study forensics and criminal justice. She was hooked on television shows like "CSI" and "Law & Order," with family members always recording them for her when she was busy with after-school activities.
She stayed clear of gangs, said her mother, Malika Crosby.
"She avoided all that. She did not like that. She stayed on her brother, telling him about doing the right thing. About getting good grades. She was just a loving, caring person."
Crosby said that at one point, her daughter brought home a homeless family, which stayed at their condo in Daly City for six months. "She let them into my home. We ended up loving them, accepting them. We had big campouts in the living room."
Morgan, a senior, had worked as an anchor for South San Francisco High's TV morning announcements, said Principal Michael Coyne, who said the school had a moment of silence Monday in memory of the slain girl.
Coyne said Morgan was a "ball of energy" and a "great kid" who was part of a four-year program to assist college-bound students.
"What she wanted more than anything was to walk across the stage and get her diploma," he said.
The night she died, her family said, Morgan was with her brother at the community center while her mother was visiting with a friend after finishing up her shift as a clerk in the X-ray department at San Francisco General Hospital.
It was common that after school, Morgan and her brother would take the bus to Third Street, get a snack at their grandmother's house and then spend their time at the community center. Morgan had been volunteering there, helping kids do their homework, her family said.
About 7:40 p.m., Crosby, who was with a friend, drove up to take her son and daughter home. She said she saw her daughter talking to friends at the center; her son was with friends nearby. The mother and daughter shared some pizza served at the center, and Crosby told her daughter she was going on an errand.
"I told her, 'We will be back in five minutes,' '' Crosby said Tuesday. Crosby and her friend drove off to get a soda and then buy gas. While she was driving to get gas on Third, she said, she heard the siren of the ambulance coming to the shooting scene.
"All the police came flying past us, toward the scene," Crosby said. "My son was calling me on the cell phone, yelling and screaming. We flew back up there. We ran every light."
When they arrived, the ambulance had yet to get there. "I saw her laying there. I just dropped (fainted) a few feet from her."
The shooting scene was a block from where one of Morgan's grandmothers lives on Palou Avenue and where she spent much of her time growing up.
Morgan sang in the choir of the Providence Baptist Church in the Bayview, which she started attending at age 6. She also liked to act and dance.
"She was active in the church,'' said the pastor, the Rev. Calvin Jones Jr. "Her grandmother had raised her and kept her in church. She made sure she and her brother came to church."
Morgan on was on the Praise dance team and went to Bible study on Wednesday nights.
''She was such a friendly girl," Jones said. "She was so small -- she still looked like a little kid. But she was growing to be a young lady. We were helping her to take the college exam."
On April 1, Morgan was set to go on a bus tour of historically black universities in the South. She already had been accepted to four colleges, including Oklahoma State University and California State University East Bay, her family said.
She was raising money for the bus tour and had put on a play at the Bayview Opera House with an ensemble cast dealing with teen issues.
James McElroy, head of youth services at the community center, said his facility is the only one left for the area's youth because both local gyms have closed.
"They don't have anywhere to go," McElroy said. "There's no programs -- once we close (for the night), they have nowhere to go. I think that is the real story."
The family said that Morgan ended up being attacked at what was supposed to be a place of safety -- the local community center in the city where her mother worked and where she was raised.
"She was where she was supposed to be -- at the youth center, where you go to stay out of trouble," said her aunt, Juanita Miles, a former member of San Francisco's Commission on the Status of Women.
Miles said that Morgan was making the right choices in her life, only to have someone strike her down for no reason.
Morgan was the child of a teen mother. Her aunt, also a teen mother, was addicted to cocaine but says she has been clean for 17 years.
"We don't have a whole lot of children who are getting out, making those strides to get out," Miles said.
"For our family personally, she was breaking the cycle -- for us, all the women, she had been shown our mistakes, so she could avoid that stuff," Miles said. "She did that. She wasn't pregnant, she wasn't on drugs, wasn't running the streets boy-crazy. She was just a sweet kid, trying to make a difference in her life. To have her taken away, so ridiculously, the impact will be forever.
"This is one of the situations where these fools have no respect for any place," Miles said. "You can't make sense out of this nonsense. I guess, on a spiritual level, what would make a change is that somebody has to do some forgiveness. All this tit-for-tat violence. At some point, there has to be some sense of forgiveness.
"She has touched so many people, so many lives," Miles added. "We want this loss not to be in vain, but to actually bring about some cause for change in what is going on in our community, what is going on with our children."
E-mail Jaxon Van Derbeken at jvanderbeken@sfchronicle.com.
This article appeared on page B - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
