In Germantown, a girl is dead, and questions rage
By Rita Giordano
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
In her middle-school yearbook last spring, Ajene Atia Bright made this wish for the world: "To stop violence." Her wish for herself was to be remembered as "cool."
And she was pretty hard to forget. You heard her before you saw her, this Germantown ninth grader, and when you saw her, it was all dimples and a flashing smile. She lived life large and happy.
And she was smart, so smart that teacher after teacher agreed that she could have been just about anything she'd wanted to be.
Instead, what Ajene will be is mourned.
The 15-year-old, a former honor student, will be laid to rest this morning. She was shot to death shortly after 3 p.m. last Saturday on a Germantown street corner now piled with the toys and mementos of a sidewalk memorial.
Ajene was at the corner of Tulpehocken Street and Belfield Avenue, about two blocks from her Clearview Avenue home, listening to her Walkman on her way to a clothes-shopping expedition, when a bullet tore into her left arm and chest.
At 4:09 p.m., she was pronounced dead on arrival at Albert Einstein Medical Center.
No arrests have been made, and police have yet to come up with a motive, but they believe that some in the neighborhood - many of them young - know more than they have been willing to tell.
Word on the street, according to Ajene's family and friends, is that the killer is a neighborhood youth who knew her and who, police concur, has a criminal record.
The family has also been told that Ajene might have just been in the wrong place at the wrong time, that as she stood at the corner, people were gambling in a nearby alley and a gun went off.
Detective Michael Gross said that a neighborhood youth has been questioned and is considered a suspect but that more than rumor is needed for an arrest.
"We're looking for witnesses," Gross said. "We're looking for someone from the neighborhood to come forward."
Ajene's mother, Eyonne Petty, 46, is pleading for the same.
"Will someone please come forward?" a sobbing Petty asked this week in her living room as friends came by with flowers, food and regrets. "This has to stop. This is senseless.
"All I know is I lost a beautiful, wonderful child" - her only child, a child who, despite adolescent turbulence of late, seemed to many to have so much heart, so much promise.
"She was like my best friend," said Simon Eleazer, 19, a Germantown High School student and Ajene's boyfriend.
"She had a certain spirit about her. Everyone loved 'Geen,' " said James Cox, 22, a family friend who considered Ajene a surrogate little sister. "She was the loudest person on the block. She was the happiest person on the block. You could hear Geen from anywhere: 'Hey, baby!' "
She was also a girl with plans.
"We were going to be millionaires," Cox said, grinning.
This summer, he said, they were planning to have their own freelance car wash.
"We were going to be entrepreneurs," he said.
Ajene had talked about becoming a psychiatrist, said her mother, a 25-year telephone operator who had put $16.25 a week into savings bonds for the medical school her daughter would attend.
"She could have been anything," said Felicia Jolley, who taught Ajene two years ago at Roosevelt Middle School.
Teachers there said she was an A and B student. In the eighth grade, she transferred to AMY Northwest Middle School, a magnet school where students are usually selected by lottery.
Principal Holly Perry remembers clearly the self-possessed girl who called on her own behalf and said she wanted to attend a smaller school, one where people were serious about learning.
"She convinced me," Perry said.
The principal let her in.
