SAYING GOODBYE: Pall bearers carry Rob Pierson's casket out of St. Francis Xavier Roman Catholic Church after his April 20 funeral. Pierson, seen below in a photograph posted at a makeshift memorial at 27th and Parrish streets, was the city's 104th homicide victim in 2006. Photo By: mike m. koehler

They were white. They were black.

On a gorgeous blue-skied morning two weeks back, they packed the church to capacity, standing three deep behind the last pew, to say goodbye to Robert Pierson, a 17-year-old from Fairmount who, after barely clinging to life for more than three weeks, succumbed to complications from the bullet that ripped through his throat and lodged near his spine.

Around 10 p.m. on Easter, a day Catholics celebrate their savior's resurrection, Rob became Philadelphia's 104th homicide victim of the year. Few of them missed that tragic irony as they tried to figure out how the senseless violence plaguing their city found its way to their neighborhood, a place that hosts a murder scene about once a generation. All of them now knew the kind of hell one kid with a gun can unleash.

One night earlier, these mourners crammed into Dinan's Funeral Home, the Spring Garden Street mainstay where Robert was laid out amidst baseball-themed floral arrangements. He had a Fairmount youth-league jersey folded atop his chest. Today, they'd endure a funeral mass lasting 75 minutes, an eternity for a grieving mother sitting feet from her deceased son.

The bell atop the church rang out four times before the pallbearers hit the steps and solemnly approached a silver hearse. Gripping the front of the casket was Rob's uncle Bobby Rounds, who stayed outside during the mass. He said he couldn't handle the smell of the incense, so he hung with his cousin Dan until he was called to duty. Bobby wore the "Gone But Not Forgotten" memorial T-shirt he had made up the day after Rob died. In one of the two pictures on it, Rob holds a fish that's nearly as big as he is. Bobby says it's a 38-inch, 40-pound striper that his nephew culled from the Schuylkill.

As everybody makes their way into limos and cars for the funeral procession to Holy Sepulchre Cemetery, Bobby walks over to a blue truck that has "RIP Robert, We Love You" written in white across the back window. He searches for the words to describe how the family feels.

"I hurt, man," he musters. "It's horrible. This is devastating."

Across the street, the neighborhood mailman recounts a story about how he'd always run into Rob over at Franklin Learning Center. "He'd be out playing baseball on a day like this," the mailman says, looking at the cloudless skies before turning serious. "You know, it's the anniversary of Columbine, and they're still selling guns."

A couple minutes after he shakes his head and walks away, the hearse makes its way up Green Street, over to 23rd and then down to the Parkway. At least 90 cars will then join the procession that passes within eyeshot of the baseball field where Rob made his mark.

It'll take a half-hour for police to direct all the cars, with their orange "Funeral" stickers, off of the curbs and out of the intersections they blocked and into the procession.

A priest, who just delivered a 20-minute sermon about vengeance, will tell a mourner that Fairmount's never seen a funeral this big.

Mourners will tell one another they hope they never see one like this again.

"I just want people to know that he was a good kid," Rob's father, Bobby Pierson, will say.

Photo By: mike m. koehler

Rob was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Tadlock is 13 years old. He's the youngest.

Graves and McCall are the oldest. They're 16.

If what police say holds true—homicide detectives say they have confessions to back it up—Rob's tragic path to St. Franny's started when this North Philadelphia sextet put their plan into action south of Girard Avenue on Thursday, March 23. But their botched crime spree didn't end with disposable cash. It changed many lives forever when one of them fired a beat-up gun and left Rob Pierson for dead on the corner of 27th and Parrish streets.

That much, so far, hasn't been disputed in this working-class nook of a yuppifying neighborhood. But dig a little deeper, and you'll find rumors and countless accounts of what people think led up to the shooting.

First, go less than a mile north of the corner, to the North Philly neighborhood where the six young suspects lived until police cuffed them. There, Tangier Loper stands at the front door of her row house, on the same street Rob called home. Just nine blocks separated them.

She says her 14-year-old son Malik, who's currently being held at the Youth Study Center with the other five, moved to town from Sicklerville, N.J., six months ago. A student at Vaux Roberts Middle School on Master Street, he fell in with the wrong crowd after having to fight his way to acceptance in his new neighborhood. Now, she can't wait to put the city behind her, just as soon as she gets her kid out of jail. And that, she says matter-of-factly, will happen, because her son came home and told her the story minutes after the shooting.

"I feel for that boy's family," she says of the Piersons. "I don't play like that, because that could've been my child. But my son doesn't know who shot him because he wasn't even there. He's never been violent."

Malik, she says, told her there was no robbery plan. It was simply a street fight that turned fatal. So she called the police and had her son turn himself in. He's scheduled to be in court today.

"Malik has nothing to hide," she says, noting that two of the other youths' fingerprints were found on the gun. "The only thing he's guilty of is fighting."

Though police say the youths have already been charged with murder, she says the family hasn't heard that yet.

COMFORT IN NUMBERS: Mourners including Rob's little sister Monica (second from left) and older sister Lauren (right, in glasses) gathered at the corner Rob was shot the night after he died. Photo By: mike m. koehler

Then, talk to Center City attorney David Nenner. He's representing McCall, whom police have identified as the gunman. (Tangier Loper says McCall's fingerprints were found on the weapon.) Nenner, who also hasn't heard whether charges have been upgraded since Rob's death, says his client and at least one of the other youths told police Loper pulled the trigger.

McCall told the lawyer he knew Rob, which isn't a stretch considering they grew up mere blocks from one another.

"Quinzell is, frankly, one of the nicest kids I've ever met," says Nenner.

McCall, who was scheduled for a court appearance to determine whether he'd be charged as an adult yesterday, said that he, Thomas and Graves were walking around their neighborhood when they ran into Loper and the other two youths. All six then made their way to a park at 27th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue "to talk to girls."

But on their way back home, "Malik starts throwing things at windows," Nenner says. "He was basically a one-man crazy act that day."

When Malik broke a window on Stillman Street, Nenner says, neighbors made their way out of their houses, prompting a street fight that wound its way to 27th and Parrish. At one point during the melee, a bottle struck Thomas in the head, so McCall went back to help his friend. That, says Nenner, is when his client heard the shots.

"The robbery story, that's absurd. If they're going to rob someone, why would they draw attention to themselves like that?" Nenner says. "Quinzell says Malik was the shooter, that he brought the gun with him … and he was showing people the gun before this happened. It's a tragedy, it really, really is. I just hope a whole lot of people don't end up paying the price for the mistake of one person."

Neither Tangier Loper nor Nenner, however, denies that the kids were around Fairmount that night. It's now a matter of which kid can convince the cops he's telling the truth, leaving the other one to suffer the consequences.

"They come through here all the time," one of Rob's friends says of North Philly youths who are thought to be troublemakers here. "They're always causing problems, but I'm not sure if these guys had been here before."

As tensions rose, someone called over to Rob's house a couple blocks away and told him something was going on. So Rob, being Rob, rushed out to help defend his neighborhood. He gets to the end of Bailey Street, where he lives, and sees a crowd making its way west from Stillman toward 27th Street, chasing after the kids who'd tried to rob somebody earlier. Already more than a block ahead of them, Rob takes the lead. Alone.

Meanwhile, the kids who'd later become suspected murderers are heading the same direction along Brown Street. They'll turn on 27th and make their way north, toward Parrish, according to a resident they pass. He'll later say he knew something was amiss because they were being so quiet.

RHYME, BUT NO REASON: As some mourners shared their grief in poems, investigators are left to sift through contradictory stories from the North Philadelphia youths suspected in a botched robbery spree that turned fatal. Photo By: mike m. koehler

Rob will reach the corner before anybody else. He'll be face to face with six kids who wanted to make some money down in the white neighborhood that night. Three shots will be heard blocks away.

"I ran toward my house to get my little brothers and make sure they were safe," says a friend of Rob's who was a block away. "Then someone told me Rob got shot. Rob got shot? I still can't believe it."

After the shots echoed off the nearby brownstones, neighbors—including a doctor—ran out to tend to Rob, who was lying face-up on the sidewalk near a handicap curb cutout. Police got there quickly. Rather than risking a long wait for an ambulance, some officers grabbed Rob, put him in the back of a white police van and sped him off to the hospital.

That night, they nabbed three of the six alleged robbers and would apprehend the others within days.

At first, friends were worried that Rob would be paralyzed. Then came the news that he was likely brain-dead. Hope, it seemed, was scarce. But anger and grief weren't.

"Racial tensions spark brawl," it proclaimed, linking the shooting to an argument that had begun "over a white woman who dates black men and brings her dates into the neighborhood." Then came the follow-up story in which an unnamed resident claimed Rob and his friends would yell at "black kids walking through the neighborhood."

Old Fairmount seethed. Why wasn't the focus on the wiry youth-baseball-league pitcher with an arm that had Notre Dame scouting him, as he fought for his life over at Hahnemann? "This has nothing to do with white and black," a family friend said the night after the shooting. "This has to do with a bunch of kids coming down here and trying to rob people. Nothing to do with color."

"That racist stuff, it's all a lie," said Bobby Pierson.

The Police Department also dismissed the implications by releasing the details of what they said the alleged robbers told investigators of their robbery-plan-gone-awry. It read, "During their travels, they confronted a white male and during this time a bottle was thrown through the window of a home. The six males then ran off but continued through the area. The six males came back around and then confronted the same white male with a group of his friends. A fight broke out between the two groups and Quinzell pulled out a .38 caliber revolver and fired, striking the complainant in the neck."

It was a matter of class, not a hate crime, they said.

SHATTERED DREAMS: Rob's father says his son was being scouted to play baseball at Notre Dame. So it was only natural that someone would place his 2004 Fairmount MVP trophy at his memorial. Photo By: mike m. koehler

"They had perceptions with that neighborhood, the white neighborhood, as being an easy target," says Sgt. Kevin Bernard, a beefy, Rizzo-idolizing street-based cop who was at the corner after Rob was shot. He thinks it was the biggest crime scene he's seen in Fairmount. "It was simple economics: They went where the money is."

Bernard thinks things would have turned out differently if a kid hadn't been able to get his hands on an illegal firearm.

"Robert was a tough kid. Hadn't there been a weapon involved, he would have won the fight," he said. "He was getting the better of the other kid, so he pulled out a gun."

Furious over the racial implications, what they couldn't have seen coming was that a murder would also expose simmering frustration between the locals and neighborhood newcomers. And much of it has to do with that old adage about not telling anybody how to raise their kids.

Like in many other Philly neighborhoods, the local youths serve as an ad hoc security force. Hanging in packs on the corners, they deter would-be thugs from messing with their turf. Rob's group of friends was no different. For years, they hung out at the corner of 25th and Parrish streets, but when a new Italian restaurant recently opened up there, they moved to another spot. Too many cops, one of the kids explained a day after the funeral.

All across the city, it's nothing new for local kids to battle with those who come onto their turf from other neighborhoods. And if a kid from another neighborhood starts dating one of your girls, watch out. Those beefs have been happening for generations. Here, though, it takes on a different dynamic.

The northwest end of Fairmount is the buffer between North Philadelphia and Center City. If something goes down, newcomers and outsiders are quick to say the kids are fighting because they're different colors. They're quick to gloss over the fact that several black youths palled around with Rob's crew, and that there were, in his dad's words, "more black people at his funeral than there are at a black person's funeral."

Sure, when they were in their early teens, they'd throw their basketballs at air conditioners, and knock on doors and run if someone complained they were making too much noise outside. When they got older, some drank. Probably smoked a little weed, too, says Bernard, who knew the kids, regularly talked to them and even ran a couple of them in. They'd write FMT on walls and traffic signs, staking their claim as real Fairmounters. But the indiscretions didn't go much further than that.

These kids weren't packing heat. They weren't boosting cars. And they weren't trolling the streets for people to rob.

They were, however, witnesses to their neighborhood's transformation. They watched as developers renovated old row houses and flipped them as upscale brownstones while even trying to rename the neighborhood. Today, longtimers joke that when something good happens, it happens in the "Art Museum Area," but when something bad happens, it happens in Fairmount.

In a perverted sense, it's almost logical that North Philly kids with easy money on their minds would think to cross Girard Avenue and cruise Fairmount on bikes looking for an easy mark. After all, higher property values mean residents with more cash. But it's safe to say that even though Rob lived a block and a half from that dividing line, nobody thought it'd end like this, with a kid from an entrenched Fairmount family paying the price for a neighborhood having more money than ever before.

Muggings and car break-ins are one thing, and they're common. But even if guns are pulled around here from time to time, the triggers are never squeezed.

Photo By: mike m. koehler

So one would figure that Rob Pierson would've been the primary focus of the March 30 Fairmount Civic Association meeting at the Mennonite High School on 24th and Poplar streets. The gathering brought droves of new Fairmounters together to talk about issues affecting the neighborhood. But rather than Rob, most in attendance were primarily concerned about the proposed high-rise along Spring Garden, parking outside the Pennsylvanian, a tree-planting initiative and the upcoming Fairmount House Tour.

Invited to speak as special guests that night were U.S. Rep. Chaka Fattah and two police officers. Fattah arrived, opened the floor to a Q&A and fielded questions about immigration and the war in Iraq before a potential casualty at home was mentioned. (At this point, Rob was still alive at the hospital.) Instead, the discussion centered on whether Mayor Street's plan to fund more police overtime could address rising crime rates. Nobody pushed the issue further when the congressman made a quick transition into the No Child Left Behind issue.

Granted, the shooting became more of a focus when Bernard and another officer took to the front of the crowd. Someone asked whether the weapon had been traced back to anybody—Bernard said it hadn't been, and it was so tattered that he doubted it would be—or if they should be worried about black kids continuing to visit the neighborhood with robbery on their minds. "Is this going to be a trend?" one asked, concerned that he might be the next person robbed.

Bernard responded that statistics show that crime is declining in the area and tried to diffuse the racial implications of the story, even as one attendee muttered under his breath that it "sounds racist to me," when the officer said the kids targeted a "white" neighborhood.

It quickly became clear to me, having spent five years at 26th and Parrish streets, in an apartment with a stoop that Rob and his friends sometimes claimed, that these were the same sort of folks who took to phillyblog.com to discuss Rob's shooting, rather than stopping by Bailey Street to check on the family. The folks who, when the cameras flocked to 27th and Parrish streets, were quoted saying they were worried about the effect it could have on property values.

That distinction was eminently clear online, as they, under the comfort of anonymity, cyber-shouted "truefairmounter" down for criticizing them for pontificating about a neighborhood culture they don't fully understand. One memorable post summarized the thoughts that many newcomers whisper, but rarely say aloud. After all, none of the old-timers much appreciates the yuppies telling them how to live.

"Fact is the true Fairmounters are different in many ways than the new Fairmounters," it read. "There are some real problems that I see with the remaining Fairmounters and I don't think they are a secret. The kids that hang on the corners at all hours of the night when they should be doing something constructive is an issue. Your community should realize it and take action. Perhaps if that were the case, horrible incidents like last night's may not have happened. Sometimes, the truth hurts."

Problem is, that wasn't exactly the truth. Besides, playing baseball is something constructive. And despite those holier-than-thou sentiments, nothing could have been done to prevent Rob's shooting, unless six kids weren't desperate enough to head south for some quick money.

It's not that the online postings caused brawls to break out across the neighborhood. Most long-time Fairmounters wouldn't know what a blog is, let alone would have checked one out after their friends' kid got mowed down on the street. It merely exposed the differences between people who are now expected to co-exist in a growing neighborhood on the fringe of one of the city's poorest areas.

There, Rob's young cousins waved signs asking people to honk their horns in the youth's memory. Taped to the stop sign across the street from where he was shot was a green poster that said, "God Only Takes the Best, and Rob Was One of Them." Tied to the post were eight mylar balloons and a poster with his picture that his classmates had signed. "Get well soon so you can graduate with us," one had written. Across the street, a Fairmount 2004 MVP baseball trophy sat surrounded by candles.

A friend of Rob's found herself talking to a Daily News reporter. "I'm over here cleaning it up," she yelled to Rob's sister Lauren, who would soon be handed sympathy flowers. "Telling her that he wasn't a troublemaker." The paper will run a generic, 14-sentence article the next day. In it, Lauren will say, "He was a nice person and always looked out for the underdogs."

Bobby Rounds, the pall-bearing uncle, duct-taped Rob's fishing pole to the sign post, the one he used to haul the massive striper in. The crowd swelled as the hours passed, with white kids and black kids comforting one another.

As the Route 7, 32 and 48 buses started dropping rush-hour commuters off at the corner, some stopped to talk to the kids, who didn't seem too shocked, which made sense considering they've almost had a month to brace themselves. Others walked past as if nothing was amiss in their world, not even looking in the direction of the youths, or briefly glimpsing at the growing shrines.

But when the sun started to set, around the same time Rob was shot, the mourners lighted candles, blocked the intersection and told stories about their fallen friend. They listened to a Peedi Crakk rap song that Rob liked and then returned to the stoops, within eyeshot of new, expensive condos.

They will laugh and they will cry. They will take comfort in familiarity, as the neighborhood around them can't stop changing, both for the richer and for the poorer.

By morning, four cans of Coors Light will be added to the memorial. Three will be full.

They'll sit next to an old teddy bear that's missing its nose. It will clutch a poem that concludes, "We will miss you, we will love you each and every day."

On the traffic sign, somebody will take a Sharpie and write, "RIP Rob. You fought a good fight, now we're going to finish it."

Red wax will drip from a candle onto the sidewalk, just feet from where Rob Pierson took a bullet for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.