I had dozens of reasons for not maintaining contact with him. I’m not sure what I could have done or said, but every time I heard a report—and it was always negative—I felt deep sadness. He had so much to offer and the stories came back that he had drifted away from all the positive influence at Vaux.
Willow started high school two years before I became the principal of Reynolds Elementary School, which is only one block from Vaux. As a principal, I felt that I would have a bigger opportunity to influence lives, could start working with them in kindergarten and those early years. In that way, I could focus more attention on helping the children in our community. I reasoned that if we didn’t get the children on the right track during those formative school years, the rest of their schooling would be spent trying to catch up—and they rarely did.
One afternoon, Willow’s former classmate and a fellow chess player, Shaun Snyder, came up to me while I stood outside of Reynolds immediately after school was dismissed. I always tried to be in front of the school to make sure all children walked home safely, got on the right bus, or found their parents’ cars. At times, I helped stand guard when they crossed the street as they headed toward the high-rise project buildings that towered over our school.
I started to greet Shaun but something about his face made me ask, “What’s wrong?”
“I hate to tell you this, Mr. EL, but it’s—well, about Willow.”
“What about him?”
“He was murdered last night.”
“Murdered?” I repeated the word, unable to fathom what I had just heard.
As I learned from Shaun and heard later from others, Willow rarely went to school, didn’t work, and began to hang out on street corners with a bad crowd. The previous afternoon, Willow and his friends stood at the corner of Seventeenth and Jefferson Streets. A neighborhood kid came up to them and said, “This is my corner and I don’t want you here. I say who stays here and who doesn’t. If I come back and you’re still on this corner, you’re dead.”
In that area, rough kids claimed certain corners as their territory and they usually tried to terrorize any kids who hung around. Many times the bullies’ primary interest was to protect their drug turfs and to keep police attention at a minimum. I don’t think they encountered any resistance from other young people.
Willow’s friends left, but not Willow. I don’t think he believed the kid was serious.
Twenty minutes later that same kid came back. This time he walked up to Willow, pulled out his gun, shot, and killed him.
As the story unfolded, I don’t remember what I said to Shaun. I heard the story, but my memory of the remainder of that conversation is still a blank page in my life.
Willow is dead. Those three words are what I remember.
When I heard about Willow’s death, it was one of the saddest moments I’ve ever had. So much talent. So young. Now he was dead.
I excused myself and hurried back into the building, walked rapidly into my office, and closed the door. I kept asking myself, “Where had we failed him? Where had I failed him? What should we have done differently?” He wasn’t the first former student to be murdered, and—sad to say—he wasn’t the last. I started to cry. I still couldn’t accept what I had just heard. I felt guilty because I hadn’t been in touch with Willow. I kept thinking of the wasted life and what I could have done to prevent that waste. “I should have contacted him,” I said to myself several times.
The tears flowed, and I tried to stop them, but I couldn’t. “He shouldn’t have died. He shouldn’t have died,” I kept saying.
I don’t know how long I stayed in my office. My mind went back to the time we met, the early run-ins, the joy of watching him achieve, and the pride I had felt for him when he left for high school. By the time he came to us, many people had already written his story. At Vaux, we edited his story and changed the flow of events. Willow worked on himself and we saw drastic revisions in his life and we were sure his story would have a happy ending. For someone to tell me that the final chapter had closed on that young man’s life was some of the worst news I had ever received.
We had lost another child.
Another life gone—and one that had showed so much promise.
Another funeral, and another time to say good-bye.
I have attended many funerals for my students and former students, but I didn’t go to Willow’s. I couldn’t say good-bye. At times, I regret not having gone, but I could not force myself to go.
Many sleepless nights followed his death. “What did we do wrong? What more should I have done?” I couldn’t get away from those haunting self-accusations.
His death took place almost a decade ago and I still can’t forget him. Even today, I miss Willow “Fu” Briggs.
His murder was similar to what happened to nineteen other students at Vaux during my time there. But none of them ever touched me as deeply as the loss of Willow Briggs. That young man still lives inside me, inspires me, and influences me to touch many others so they don’t end up like him.
Did I fail Willow?
When I look at the facts and evaluate everything we did, my mind says no, but my heart says yes. Perhaps I should have contacted him, made more of an effort to see him, found ways to keep him involved in chess and school activities. I know that to dwell on what I “should have done” isn’t productive. I can never get beyond the sense that I personally failed to reach him. And this ongoing grief is more than just one boy named Willow. It’s Willow and nineteen other Vaux students who have been murdered in the inner city.
None of those deaths should have happened.
But they did, and they still do.
And when they do, it means our influence has failed.
I’ve often thought that if some of us had started a program at his high school—if I had gone there and offered to help them get a chess program going—he might be alive today. After his death, we initiated programs at several other high schools. That’s one good thing that resulted from the loss of Willow. After his death—and because of his death—we went to other inner-city schools and helped them begin chess programs to influence and change kids. We wanted to give the Willows of the inner city opportunity and hope.
Even now, I believe that if Willow’s high school had implemented a chess program or something to challenge his mind and stimulate him to achieve, he would still be alive. Maybe instead of being shot that afternoon, he might have been at chess practice, involved in a chess tournament, or in a room somewhere reading about chess.
Willow’s death, more than any other, has made me focus on the influence we have on our young people and how everything we do affects everything they do.
I’ve tried to find ways to help students stay off the streets. Since then, not only have we focused on programs to help students while they’re in school, but even after they go on to college, we try to continue to enlarge the sphere of positive influence. For example, many of our students went on to George Washington Carver High School for Engineering and Science. We started a chess program there with my former students, Demetrius Carroll, Earl Jenkins, Nathan Durant, and Ralph Johnson. We also had students who played in similar programs at Benjamin Franklin Learning Center High School, another magnet school1 in the inner city.
After Willow died, I realized how important it was for me to influence people who could pass it on and positively affect others. For instance, I thought of my relationship with the teachers in our school. If I improved my relationship with them, they could improve the relationship with their students.
Today, I am more