© CARLOS ORTIZPearl Williams talks about her grandson TySean Williams, a 15-year-old honor student who was shot and killed Nov. 6 at her Adams Street home when she opened the door.
Williams, who said she was grateful for both the arrests and the petition, said her grandson on Wednesday had participated in MasterMinds, an academic competition for high school students, before she picked him up to take him to church, which they attended every week. They'd been home about an hour when they heard a knock at their door about 9 p.m.
"The door was unlocked and I heard the knock. I saw the bottom lock start to shake. I said 'Who is it?' and I tried to lock it, then they pushed the door and I was pushing back and I said 'Oh god, oh god, help me, help me, oh god,' and there was two of them and one of me.
"The one with the gun got his hand through the door and pointed the gun at me, that's when my baby ran out of his room and he pushed the guy with the gun into my cabinet, and he pushed him so hard I thought I heard a crack, but when TySean turned around to see if I was okay the guy kind of got his composure ... and he pushed TySean into my stove and he got his gun and he went 'bang, bang, bang' and he shot him. And he pushed the door again and shot him again."
The men then fled, and Williams said she tried to call 911 but she couldn't at first.
"My baby crawled into my dining room behind me. And I said "oh god, oh god you've got to dial 911 for me, you've got to do it.' I don't know how I dialed 911."
As they waited for an ambulance, Williams said TySean, shot at least twice, was in agony and called out to her to help him. As the ambulance crew worked on him and prepared him for going to the hospital, he again reached out to his grandmother.
"They were trying to put him on that little flat thing cause he was trying to roll off of that to come to me, and I was trying to bend down to get to him," she said. "Two people had to hold his legs because he was trying to get off."
A short time later, TySean's family, including his mother, Shuane Williams, with whom TySean also lived occasionally, was told he was not going to live.
The next morning police said TySean was not the intended target of the homicide, but the attack was also not random.
Since, then, Pedro Diaz, 18, of Waverly Place and Taiquan L. Elmore, 22, of Tremont Street, have been charged with second-degree murder in connection with the homicide, said Rochester Deputy Police Chief Mike Wood.
Diaz and Elmore both pleaded not guilty Tuesday morning in City Court and were taken to the Monroe County Jail without bail. They are scheduled to return to City Court this week.
TySean was an honor-roll student at Wheatland-Chili High School. His family said he wanted to be a video game and Web designer; in sixth-grade he picked out Rochester Institute of Technology as the college he wanted to attend.
He "was not the intended target, but a horrible set of circumstances led to his death," said Assistant District Attorney Perry Duckles.
Duckles declined to share details about the investigation.
The only other person home at the time of the shooting was Pearl Williams' son, Shea Williams, who is TySean's uncle. He was upstairs in his room at the time, Pearl Williams said.
TySean's father, Cornelius Portis, sat through the arraignment Tuesday and said the arrests meant "a little relief" for his family.
"I had to be here for (my son) today," Portis said. "TySean, he was a good kid ... He was taken for nothing."
Portis said he did not know or recognize Diaz and Elmore, but "I hope they get what they deserve."
A petition has been started on MoveOn.org called "Strengthen Gun Trafficking Laws: Remembering TySean." The petition was created by Starmeshia Jones, a childhood friend of TySean's, who hopes it will draw awareness to gun violence past the time TySean's name is no longer in the news.
By 3 p.m. Tuesday, 67 people had signed it.
"We kind of pay attention to these deaths as long as they're in the media and then it fades to black and nobody really takes the time to be proactive and find out what we can do at the community level," said Jones, who grew up near TySean's home on Adams Street and now lives in Indianapolis, Ind.
"This kid who was only protecting his grandmother, doing what he thought was the right thing, and was killed because of that, and I just think that we can all be sad about it now, and then next week we just go on with our lives. It's just a vicious cycle."
Rochester Mayor-elect Lovely Warren said she was unaware of the petition, but said change needs to come in the city's neighborhoods through access to better education and jobs.
"Our community should be in an uproar, and we all should all be sad, but we should be really diligent about addressing and attacking this issue from all sides," said Warren, who said she visited TySean's grandmother at her home.
"He was a good kid who was doing all the right things," she said of TySean. Now he, and the men charged with his murder are lost to the community, she said.
"For what? For what?" Warren asked.
Rochester school officials said last week that TySean had completed eighth grade at Nathaniel Rochester Community School No. 3 in 2012 and through the BOCES Urban Suburban program transferred to the Wheatland-Chili school district in September 2012.
TySean had been learning Mandarin Chinese in school, and voluntarily attended summer school some years to bring his grade point average up, even though it was already above average, his grandmother said.
A few hours before he was killed, he told his grandmother that he could have answered more questions in the MasterMind competition, but he was quiet and shy.
"I told him 'you're getting there, you're getting there'," Pearl Williams said, smiling. "He was a bookworm. He was quiet, but he was so smart. I was so proud of him."
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