Penny's lane: Clarke stands on Woodland Avenue, where Q was last seen.

Q and As

A mother seeks answers in the case of her son’s brutal murder.

by Frank Rubino

It’s a bitterly cold afternoon, but Marie “Penny” Clarke has other reasons for shivering as she walks down a threadbare Southwest Philadelphia street. Stopping at a nondescript rowhouse, she says, “We lived here for nine years. Right here on the nobody cares block.”

Clarke, a willowy 37-year-old mother of three, is visiting the 2200 block of Bonaffon Street—a side street off Woodland Ave. between 67th and 68th—for the first time since she and her two teenage daughters fled to lower West Philly last August.

A Roxborough native, she never liked Southwest, describing it as drug-plagued and dangerous. She recalls occasions when she opened her door to discover gunshot victims lying outside.

But 14 months ago, her distaste became enmity.

Days after Thanksgiving 2007, someone—quite possibly a group of individuals—savagely murdered Clarke’s 15-year-old son Antonio Quintin Clarke, known as “Q.” The John Bartram High sophomore was last seen waiting for the 11 trolley at 67th and Woodland.

Deepening Clarke’s sorrow is the prospect of Q’s killers escaping justice, since no one’s been arrested. And chilling her mood today, the handful of Bonaffon Street residents she chats up seem reluctant to discuss Q’s murder, although Clarke suspects they’ve heard things.

Coupled with a police investigation she’s come to regard as lacking urgency, her ex-neighbors’ silence intensifies Clarke’s conviction that she and her daughters are in this alone.

“I knew coming down here would upset me,” she says, her breath visible in the frigid air. “I’m shaking. I know somebody down here knows who killed Q.”

But knowing something isn’t the same as discussing it, especially on Bonaffon Street and those surrounding it—streets that were scary even before the Bloods moved in.

Chronologically, Q’s murder was Philadelphia’s 368th of 2007. Brutality-wise, it might’ve been No. 1.

Q’s assailants beat him beyond recognition. They slashed his throat and stabbed him in the back nine times. They stripped him, wrapped him in cellophane, placed plastic bags around his head and feet and deposited him on a Gray’s Ferry loading dock.

“It was a brutal attack,” says Sgt. Tim Cooney, a supervisor in the Homicide Division’s “Two Squad,” which has the case. “It indicates emotion, rage. And when a victim is stripped it generally indicates a desire to degrade them.”

Who would set upon a 15-year-old so ferociously? Marie Clarke’s gut tells her it was members or associates of the United Blood Nation street gang.

Capt. Dennis Cullen, commander of the police criminal intelligence unit, declined to discuss the Bloods with PW. But his predecessor, Capt. Charles Bloom, told reporters shortly after Q’s murder that the notoriously violent national gang had recently expanded its ranks in Southwest Philly.

And for a time, Q was apparently infatuated with becoming a Blood—or at least with impersonating one. “He acted as if he was a member,” Homicide Inspector Joseph Mooney said two months after Q’s murder. “He was a wannabe.”

Bloods wear red, and Clarke says Q started donning a red Phillies cap months before his death. She thought little of it, and was surprised when Bartram officials called to express concerns about a red print jacket Q wore and a red bandana he’d begun carrying in his back pocket.

“They were saying they were having problems with Bloods in the school,” she recalls, adding that she assured them Q wasn’t one.

“There wasn’t nothing about the way he acted that would make you think he was in a gang,” she says. “If you’d told somebody he was a Blood, they would’ve said you was crazy.”

Just before Thanksgiving, Bartram officials again called Clarke, this time to inform her that Q hadn’t attended school in three days. When confronted, her son said he was too scared to go, claiming he’d recently tussled with youths around 70th and Woodland.

“He said they knew he went to Bartram,” Clarke remembers, “and they were telling people they were going to hurt him.”

Grounded, Q stayed in for most of Thanksgiving break. But on Sunday evening he ventured out to the bus stop. He ended up on the loading dock the next day.

That week a teenage girl on Bonaffon Street showed Clarke a MySpace webpage (which is still up) depicting Q and other youths wearing red bandanas over their faces while making code signals with their hands. “Blood Nigga” by West Coast rapper Jay Rock pulsates in the background.

Since viewing that webpage Clarke has suspected the Bloods. She doesn’t know whether Q joined and subsequently changed his mind, flirted with joining or feigned membership to appear “down,” but she’s convinced he did something that infuriated someone connected with the gang.

“I think they made an example of him,” she says.

Marie Clarke’s intuition aside, Cooney says the investigation hasn’t yielded evidence that Bloods murdered Q. Cooney’s carefully chosen words imply that detectives aren’t working with a ton of evidence. Nevertheless, he says they’re intent on solving the case.

“It’s never been put on the shelf or considered a cold case,” he says. “There are still some investigative things we can do. Hopefully, we can get some answers and bring the family some closure.”

Marie Clarke, however, has lost faith. She says immediately following Q’s death she phoned the assigned detective, Donald Marano, weekly. But as he rarely returned her calls, she became disillusioned and now tries to reach him only occasionally.

“It seems like they don’t care,” she says, asserting that she’s given police leads they haven’t tracked. For example, she says several months ago she notified an unenthusiastic Marano after a teenage girl living in a Southwest Philly shelter told her a boy there was boasting about having participated in Q’s murder.

But Cooney, who didn’t allow PW to interview Marano, insists police pursued that lead, which didn’t pan out.

“It was definitely followed,” he says. “In fact, that young lady has my personal cell phone number, and she still calls me periodically to ask how the case is going.”

Clarke’s frustration with the police is typical of a mother in her situation, according to Dorothy Johnson-Speight, founder of Mothers in Charge, a support organization for families affected by violence.

“Almost every mother whose child’s murder is unsolved feels that way,” Johnson-Speight says, adding that the complaints are often legitimate. “But so many people who have information don’t talk, and the police can only go so far without information.”

Cooney notes that sometimes people start talking when they need help themselves.

“Very often we’ll have people up here for one thing and they’ll start talking about something else,” he says. “And it gets the ball rolling and all the pieces fall in, and a case that’s two or three years old is solved in a couple of weeks based on a person trying to get himself out of a jam.”

While acknowledging Q’s rendezvous with the Bloods, whatever the details, Clarke emphasizes his positive pursuits.

For example, he worked for three years at the recently closed Southwest Community Center, where his ambition impressed program coordinator Phillip Bradley.

“He talked about becoming a police officer,” says Bradley, who adds that Q helped him produce radio shows for WDAS-AM. “I don’t know anything about the gang stuff. That wasn’t the person I worked with.”

Clarke says Q often carried his sister Kwanesha, who has muscular dystrophy. And he ran errands for senior citizens.

“He was a good kid,” she says. “I’m heartbroken.”

Rather than seek out grief counseling, Clarke says she’s marshaled an inner strength to press on for Kwanesha, 17, and her 19-year-old sister, Shantae.

Others notice a downturn in her spirits. “I think Penny’s depressed,” says Antoinette Haren, Clarke’s best friend.

Asked whether she believes the law will eventually catch up with Q’s killers, Clarke says, “I hope, but after this long, it feels as though they already got away with it.”