More than 100 mourners remember Alajawan Brown at prayer vigil in Skyway (Slideshow)

At about 6 p.m. April 29, 12-year-old Alajawan Brown got off the bus in front of the 7-Eleven on Martin Luther King Jr. Way in Skyway for the walk home. He had just bought some cleats at Walmart to get ready to play football. Just minutes later he ran back, bleeding from a gunshot wound, near death. He made it just to the front of the store, where he co

At about 6 p.m. April 29, 12-year-old Alajawan Brown got off the bus in front of the 7-Eleven on Martin Luther King Jr. Way in Skyway for the walk home.

He had just bought some cleats at Walmart to get ready to play football.

Just minutes later he ran back, bleeding from a gunshot wound, near death. He made it just to the front of the store, where he collapsed and died, despite the efforts of two passersby to help him.

A half block away, a 27-year-old man lay bleeding, in critical condition. His condition is not available under privacy rules.

Both were hit by gunfire as a violent group argued and opened fire in the parking lot of the Cedar Village Apartments on South 129th Street.

More than 20 rounds were fired. A stray bullet hit Alajawan as he walked up South 129th Street toward home.

Wednesday night, the Skyway community came together in a prayer vigil where Alajawan died to remember him.

Alajawan’s murder – his death was ruled a homicide by the King County Medical Examiner’s Office – has saddened and angered those who knew him well and even strangers, who all wonder why a young child could die so violently in a residential neighborhood.

Alajawan was buying the cleats with the $20 his 16-year-old brother Louis had paid him to clean the kitchen.

“He was coming home. He got caught in the crossfire,” said Louis. “He didn’t know he was hit.

Alajawan is the youngest of Ayanna and Louis Brown’s four children.

“He used to entertain us so much,” brother Louis said. “He was one of those people who had to have the last word. It was that personality.”

He was talented and “a great football player,” Louis said. A football, basketball and Bible stood out at a memorial near where he died.

Alajawan was a determined young man who “worked hard for everything he got,” his brother said.

Of course, Alajawan’s death hit his parents hard.

“She hasn’t cried today, which is good,” Louis said of his mother just before the vigil Wednesday.

Since the shooting, the Sheriff’s Office has been stymied in its investigation because no one is stepping forward to explain what happened at that apartment complex.

Sgt. John Urquhart, a spokesman for the Sheriff’s Office, expressed the outrage this way.

“This is an apartment complex at 6 p.m. on a Thursday afternoon. There are people everywhere, yet there are 20-plus bullets flying. That’s the outrage.

“The fact that a 12-year-old boy is killed is an outrage.

“The fact that we are having trouble getting information from witnesses is an outrage beyond comparison.”

The Sheriff’s Office is asking for the public’s help, including posting fliers in the neighborhood, for information that will help solve the two shootings.

A memorial fund has been set up for Alajawan’s family at the US Bank in Skyway under his name.

Alajawan’s friends and the teen staff at the Renton-Skyway Boys and Girls Club planned to set up a snack table after school near Dimmitt Middle School to raise money for the family, too.

Alajawan attended Dimmitt but more recently was home-schooled, his brother said.

Alajawan was the same age as the middle schoolers who attend the programs at the Boys and Girls Club near Dimmitt. He wasn’t a member of the club.

His death “has really bothered the kids,” said club director Dorina Calderon-McHenry. She just took over the job from Meg Pitman, who is taking a position overseeing programs with the Boys and Girls Clubs of King County.

“They are frightened, understandably,” she said of the club members.

The youngsters have talked amongst themselves in the teen room and with the adult staff of the club. They talk about being in the wrong place at the wrong time, Calderon-McHenry said. There’s talk of fate.

“He was doing nothing but getting off the bus,” she said. “It’s hard to make sense of it.”

Imelda Berg was one of the neighbors who Alajawan always seemed to be ready to help.

Berg describes Alajawan as her “buddy.” He would come over when he lived closer to her in Skyway to work in her yard or do chores to earn some money. He helped others in the neighborhood, too.

“I bought him his first little weed puller,” said Berg, who is planning to put together a book of neighborhood stories about Alajawan for his family.

He spent an entire day with her, when, just 11 years old, he was trying to earn some money to buy a necklace for his grandmother.

They remained in touch even after his family moved. He came by recently for a visit. They hugged. That was that last time Berg saw Alajawan.

Alajawan was mature “way beyond his years,” said Berg, who describes herself as a 50-year-old white woman.

“I knew one day I would say, ‘I knew him when’,” she said. “We knew he would be a leader.”

Just after the shooting, Rev. Steve E. Baber, pastor of the Skyway United Methodist Church, got calls from some Skyway grandmothers asking him to talk with them about how to stop “children killing children.”

“I am willing to do whatever it takes to save our grandchildren,” he said.

He frames the problem of black children dying violently and living in poverty as a national problem. He wonders why 40 percent of the black children in King County live in poverty in the Seattle and Northwest, which are home to such large corporations as Microsoft and McCaw.

“If these were children who were white, if this was happening in Medina, everything would halt,” he said. The reaction to poverty and shootings depends on skin color but also on “zip codes and census tracts.”

He points to a case where four members of a family were murdered in Kirkland, Rightly so, he said, the public was outraged. But there was no similar outrage when four men happened to drive into the wrong driveway and were shot to death in Skyway, he said, because assumptions are made.

“You expect that to happen in that census tract,” he said.

Funeral service

The funeral for Alajawan Brown is 11 a.m. May 10 at Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Baptist Church, 4519 N.E. 10th St., in the Renton Highlands.