Alicia Roberts was dialing her 13-year-old “baby” son’s cellphone number when another call came through — telling her someone had killed him.
She was calling to tell her son, Marquell Banks, that she’d finished cooking a dinner of collard greens, baked macaroni and cheese, and steak. “I was calling him to come home, get ready for school, and eat,” she said. “That’s when I got the call.”
Roberts’ son’s “baby mother” was on the line. She told him about the report that Marquell had died across town on Porter Street, off North Frontage Road.
Roberts didn’t want to believe it, she said in an interview at her home Monday. She rushed over to see if it was true.
She arrived around 9:20 p.m. to find cops and reporters surrounding a taped-off crime scene at Porter and Parmalee Avenue.
“I just want to know: Is it my son?” she cried out.
Police told her, yes, it was. Someone had shot Marquell in the head.
Roberts was beside herself. Police calmed her down, ushered her into a cruiser to take her to Yale-New Haven Hospital’s emergency room to identify the body.
Along the ride, a small part of her held out.
“You still had that little bit of hope it’s not your kid,” she said.
The truth “hit home” when she saw Marquell’s body. “He was lying there [as though] sleeping, with a bandage on his head. That’s a parent’s worst nightmare. You have to ID your child. He was only 13. He was just starting life, not doing nothing. Now I’m about to bury my son.”
“Pain” Hits Home
Roberts recalled that nightmare Monday morning sitting with her sister, Bridgette Roberts, in the kitchen of her third-story walk-up a block from Fair Haven School, where Marquell was in seventh grade. (They asked not to be photographed for this story.) ABC’s “The View” played on a grainy picture on a Tru-Tech television set no one was watching in the spare living room.
Meanwhile, police were looking for an 18-year-old New Haven man they believe killed Marquell. Police said Marquell was with that man and two other older teens in the first-floor apartment on Porter Street Sunday night. The 18-year-old allegedly shot Marquell in the head and then fled. Police arrived on the scene around 7:30; they found the two other teens, whom they brought to the station for questioning. They obtained a search warrant for the apartment. Overnight they also obtained a murder warrant for the 18-year-old.
The murder charge indicates that they believe the shooting was intentional. That would make the shooting the city’s 28th homicide of 2011. Police also expect to charge the man with gun offenses. It’s still unclear why the man allegedly shot Marquell.
The “why” certainly bedeviled the Roberts sisters in the Fair Haven apartment Monday.
Alicia Roberts said Marquell — the youngest of her four children, known as “Quellay” — had said he was going to a friend’s house earlier Sunday afternoon. She didn’t know which friend; she assumed it was a friend in the neighborhood.
“I’m surprised somebody did this to my son,” she said. “He got along with everybody. He loved rapping, video games, basketball.”
Frank Redente, Marquell’s coach at Farnam Neighborhood House, called him a “great kid. He was not a wise guy. He always came to pracitce. He was a leader on the team.”
Marquell played forward in Farnam’s biddy basketball league, according to Redente; his team won the league championship last year when Marquell scored the winning basket. He also played in a summer league.
“When I hear about other people’s kids getting killed, I cry. I feel the pain,” Alicia Roberts said Monday. Now, she added, she knows what the pain feels like firsthand.
“Hug your kids when they walk out that door,” Marquell’s aunt Bridgette said. “Tell them you love them. You never know when it’s your turn.”
