He started off life with one strike, his first name.
Via NY Daily News:
A Queens mom spoke to her 16-year-old son by phone about 10 p.m. on New Year’s Eve, telling him to stay inside.
“He said that he would,” a tearful Marguerite Tolson-Jackson, 52, told the Daily News.
It was the last time she would hear her boy’s voice. The teen went to hang out with friends and was fatally shot in the neck around 11:30 p.m. Thursday near a pal’s home at Merrick Blvd. and 109th Ave. in Jamaica.
Jihad Jackson became the last murder victim of 2015, a year that saw a 4.5% increase — from 333 to 348 — in homicides. It was the first time the number of murders increased from year to year in New York since 2010. There were 471 homicides in 2009 and 536 in 2010 — a spike of 13.8%.
The police questioned two men in connection with Jackson’s murder, but no arrests have been made. The motive was still unclear late Friday.
Jackson, his parents and siblings had taken a bus to Washington, D.C., for a two-week visit to celebrate his older brother’s birthday.
But the teen grew bored and homesick and begged his mom to let him come back to New York. He left on a return bus Thursday, and was supposed to go straight to his house in Rosedale. Instead, he went to the friend’s house where he had his final phone conversation with his mom.
“I just told him to stay inside,” Tolson-Jackson told The News.
Jackson, a junior at Law Enforcement High School, later sent Snapchat photos to his cousin in D.C. He seemed at ease, sporting a green hoodie, jeans and a pair of Timberlands he’d gotten as a Christmas gift.
All of a sudden, the Snapchat photos stopped.
Worried relatives used Facebook to try to find him, sending messages to his friends.
“Have you heard from Jihad?” his mom wrote to one of her son’s female friends.
At about 1:20 a.m. Friday, Tolson-Jackson’s phone rang.
“I figured it was somebody calling me to say Happy New Year,” she said. “Instead, they kept saying, ‘Is it true? Is it true?’”
Tolson-Jackson got her things together and the family boarded a bus for a sad ride back to New York.
“My son wasn’t a troublesome child, polite, respectful, but trouble would find him,” the mom said.