SnapGlow.TV: Modern Gems Galore! Philadelphia Housing Authority Police Officer Craig Kelley told a judge yesterday how being shot last year took away so much of what he loved - working the streets, manning the security booth inside the Queen Lane Apartments high rise, protecting the people inside.
Still limited to desk duty at PHA headquarters, "shuffling papers, crunching numbers," he said that being shot by a teen with a military-style assault rifle has taken away "my persona," the cop he had been for 17 years.
Yesterday, Common Pleas Judge Gwendolyn Bright sentenced shooter Zahir Boddy-Johnson to 23 1/2 to 47 years in state prison on charges of attempted murder, aggravated assault and a weapons charge.
"Not only have you devastated him [Kelley] physically, you've devastated him psychologically as well," the judge told Boddy-Johnson, 19.
In a statement taken just hours after the shooting, Boddy-Johnson told city police detectives that he had wanted to rob the PHA officer of his laptop and his gun to "sell them for restitution for my stolen-car case."
About 10 p.m. Feb. 17, 2008, Kelley was inside the front security booth of the Germantown high rise, on Queen Lane near Pulaski Street, a place he considered like his home.
Boddy-Johnson, then 17, of Diamond Street near 25th, North Philadelphia, had an aunt who lived in the high rise.
He knocked on the booth's door and when Kelley opened it, he shot the officer once in the left side of his abdomen.
The bullet tore through Kelley's bulletproof vest, lodging inside his body.
Kelley then closed the door. That didn't stop Boddy-Johnson.
He fired the assault rifle two more times at the bullet-resistant glass window before fleeing.
A jury in June found that Boddy-Johnson had tried to kill Kelley.
"If it had not been for my equipment [vest], I would literally not be here," Kelley, 50, told the judge yesterday. "I was attacked viciously with an instrument of war."
Boddy-Johnson apologized to the officer.
"I take full responsibility for what I did," he said. "I shouldn't have done it. It wasn't how I was raised . . .
"I was following . . . what everybody around me was doing . . . seeing what they were doing, trying to be like everybody else," he said.
Assistant District Attorney Deborah Cooper Nixon yesterday told the judge this case was "very, very troubling" because Boddy-Johnson appears to have a loving and supportive family and had no history of having been abused or of having had a drug problem - something that might better explain why he did what he did.
Noting that the teen had covered his face with a scarf that night and had multiple rounds of ammunition with him, she contended: "He was prepared for a slaughter that night."
Defense attorney Mike Parkinson had conceded at trial that his client had shot Kelley, but argued that he had not tried to kill him.
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