Posted on 04/02/2008 7:23:32 AM PDT by 2banana
'Mother's pride' is laid to rest By DAFNEY TALES & DAVID GAMBACORTA Philadelphia Daily News
LONG AFTER the final hymn had been sung and the last rose had been laid across her son's bronze casket, Sharon Conroy sat in her quiet home in Lansdowne trying to make sense of it all.
Her mind drifted through a steady stream of tender memories of her son, Sean Patrick Conroy.
She could see him as an eager, grinning Cub Scout, then as the kid who went to dinner and a movie with her every Friday night until it seemed uncool at age 15.
She remembered his spontaneous move to California after high school to become an animator for Disney, then his return to the Philadelphia area, where he matured into his "mother's pride," working as a mentor in North Philly and helping out with charities.
He found a job that he loved, running a Center City Starbucks, fell in love with the woman of his dreams and, at age 36, planned on a full and happy life. "This was the gentle man I was lucky enough to call my son," Sharon Conroy said.
Then it all fell apart on an underground SEPTA platform in Center City last Wednesday afternoon, when four teens inexplicably attacked Conroy's son, kicking and punching him until he had a fatal asthma attack, police said.
Police arrested Kinta Stanton, 16, a 10th-grader at Simon Gratz High School, and charged him as an adult with murder. Stanton has refused to identify the other youths, who also attend Simon Gratz and remain on the loose, a police source said.
Last night, people who answered the door at Stanton's home on Smedley Street near Griscom told a reporter that they didn't know him.
The fatal attack, which investigators said had been unprovoked, has incensed citizens across the city, from everyday SEPTA riders to Conroy's friends and relatives.
They wonder why no one has turned in the other teens, or what could have prompted them in the first place to attack an innocent guy who was known for his gentle, easygoing nature.
Through it all, Sharon Conroy said she remains calm in this tumultuous sea of anger and pain.
"It's not to say that I'm not angry," she said yesterday, hours after her son was buried at Ss. Peter and Paul Cemetery, in Marple Township. "But my son was a gentle person and would have wanted us to get all the facts."
Conroy said nearly 200 teary-eyed mourners packed St. Cyril's Church, in Lansdowne, for her son's funeral, and the funeral procession included 170 cars.
Starbucks employees were among the attendees, including Mike Rose, a district manager, who talked about Conroy as helpful and compassionate.
Old friends from his Cub Scout days showed up, and a former employer from California sent a two-page euology about how "gentle and polite" Sean Patrick Conroy was.
On Easter Sunday, Conroy became engaged to his longtime girlfriend, Stevany Johar. Yesterday, Johar released a statement through Sharon Conroy, which read in part:
"I still cannot accept his death in so many ways. Everything reminds me of him. Part of me still believes that he will come home, give me a kiss and also a hug like he always did."
In the week since Conroy's death, SEPTA's subway lines have been flooded with more than two dozen members of the Guardian Angels, the civilian watchdog group that was founded in 1979 in response to violence on New York's subway system.
"SEPTA riders are terrified," said Curtis Sliwa, founder and president of the organization. "These kids come on like a tsunami onto trains and trolleys and start acting wild."
The Guardian Angels will patrol the Broad Street line and the Market-Frankford El Monday through Friday, from 1 to 5 p.m., to address commuters' fears. *
Daily News staff writers Mensah Dean and Kirstin Lindermayer contributed to this report.
“And while I’m at it, when is the media going to notice that abortionists are mostly aborting black babies?”
Then how would the abortion agencies make $$$?
Just like drugs, there are those who want to legalize it to tax it to make more $$$.
Back to the topic, Bill Cosby spoke out against black on black violence, they tried to derail him with some stupid affair some years back.
What we are witnessing is the children of the LBJ great society.
Actually, if Obama won it wouldn’t reduce the claims that America is racist. We’d immediately be shown statistics that a majority of whites voted against him, and that those whites are racist and need re-education. Then, every proposal Obama put forth as president would be seen through a racial prism. If we oppose his tax hikes, we’re “racists” who don’t want our taxes raised to pay for benefits for “people of color”. If we oppose his plan to dump trillions of dollars into African despotisms, we’re “racist”. If we object to his nomination of a black nationalist lesbian to the Supreme Court, we’re racists, sexists, and homophobes.
The truly scary scenario is if Obama gets elected, and then something ‘happens’ to him.
I don’t endorse or support that, but instead cringe at how it would rip our country up. Our enemies on the far shores know this, and would try to make it happen.
Most major US cities would become hell-towns, and the infiltration by foreigners would step up in the confusion.
That’s why I think Obama poses the biggest threat to our country.
A high school friend of my nephew’s went to Drexel, until he got mugged on his way to class in his freshman year. He returned to Drexel the following, year, to try again. Again, he got beat up on his way to class. I don’t know what happened to him after that. He probably switched to community college.
The problem with Philadelphia is that the inmates are in charge of the asylum. Rendell had a very good chance to fix things in Philadelphia, but he had no interest in change. Rendell used the corruption to his own advantage.
Someone has to say it - It NEEDS to be a hate crime when black ministers preach their ‘white hate messages’ from their pulpit . Where are ‘white’ alsharpton’s jessejackson’s? Afraid of being called racists - FEAR (PC) STOPS them from taking action.
Wow, I think I understand why Philly is so often known as “Killadelphia”... what ever happened to “The City of Brotherly Love”?
If Sean had been Negro and the youths white, ALL of the screaming media, politicians and police would be calling this a HATE CRIME, and ALL of the white boys would be in jail.
The media would describe the murderers as Japanese, Chinese, or White, but they are scared spitless to identify the perps as Negro or muslim.
I wish I had the old R. Crum cover "City of Brotherly Love" which shows a group of Philly whites and blacks beating the crap out of eachother. This was from the early 1960s.
Philly has a LONG history of interracial violence. In the old days, it was largely white on black, but since the late 1960s, it has switched to black on white.
The last time I can remember a large scale white on black incident was when a riot nearly broke out in SW Philly when a black family tried to move into a poor white neighborhood in the late 1980s.
All of this points to the fact that Philly is one of the most racially backward places in 21st Century America.
Certainly not as long as their race-baiting black “leaders” continue to spew the racial “hate Whitey” swill that Jeremiah Wright - ‘scuse me - Doctah Wright - and his crowd of opportunists spew on an ongoing basis.
We need more people who are willing to do what Bernie Getz did in our inner cities. Getz went thru hell but he is alive!
Shoot look at Africa and see what they do to their own. Remember seeing a river in Rawanda with floating bodies? Remember Dufur? Now see what’s happening in Kenya?
I'm sure we would have heard that they were aspiring architects and doctors who never got into any "real" trouble and who were "jus' foolin' around".
They crucified Goetz and ruined his life for defending himself, saying the black "utes" were just asking to borrow some money and he shot them in cold blood.
The rules are different for Philly. That was the only way to get “shall issue” passed for the rest of the state.
“...four teens inexplicably attacked...”
“... wonder why no one has turned in the other teens, or what could have prompted them in the first place to attack an innocent guy...”
Whoever wrote those words knows why, and is deliberately trying to stop us from thinking about it.
It wasn’t inexplicable. It was a hate crime. Blacks attack Whites. That’s a hate crime.
What prompted them to attack is the hatred for Whites that they learned from their elders and their Rev Wright type ministers.
Anyone who tries to justify blacks attacking Whites is equally guilty.
Was this crime committed in view of others? If so, why did no one help?
Rhetorical question I know....
Post-Rudy, much of Central Harlem is no longer as dangerous as it once was. There are actually whites living there (especially Euro hipsters). Hell, I found myself driving down 125th Street at 1AM on a weeknight, and I saw blacks, whites, and hispanics walking along the main drag, something that would have been unthinkable 15 years ago.
Philly, on the other hand, reminds me of Lindsey-era New York, albeit with a rising black majority. New York was helped in that the wealthy never left, and it attracted a multiethnic range of immigrants to keep one race from dominating politically. Philly, on the other hand, has been a city of neer do well blacks, and a declining population of proletarian whites, with a small area of center city reserved for the yuppies. In other words, it is still stuck demographically in the 1970s.
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