Q and As

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

By Frank Rubino
Add Comment Add Comment | Comments: 0 | Posted Jan. 28, 2009

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

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.

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