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Murder victim's mom: 'Closure is a myth'

Mary Nicholas' innocent son was shot dead in broad daylight. After a dozen years, she's still sad, but not bitter.

Mary Nicholas flanked by her sons Theodore (left) and Erik, an innocent bystander killed on Broad Street by a bullet meant for someone else.
Mary Nicholas flanked by her sons Theodore (left) and Erik, an innocent bystander killed on Broad Street by a bullet meant for someone else.Read more

MARY NICHOLAS is a retired RN, a reader, a researcher, a thinker.

In her Nicetown rowhouse (now being remodeled) she tells me that Nicetown "isn't called that because it's nice." It's named after early Dutch settlers.

She is the mother of "Murder Victim No. 99 in 2002," she says. An innocent bystander, her gentle, funny son Erik was cut down on a sunny May afternoon at a Getty station on North Broad Street. He was shot by a thug aiming at someone else after a fight at a basketball game.

Erik, 25, was murdered one day after former Mayor John Street announced his Operation Safe Streets. There would be 288 homicides in the city that year, actually an off year. There were 309 the year before and 350 the year after.

Milton Young, 26, also was shot dead and two gas-station workers were wounded. Nicholas was seated when the deadly bullet found him. "My son never got a chance to stand," says Mary.

The shooting made a small splash in the Daily News, was a roundup item in the Inquirer and then vanished. Who cares?

Mary cared, but didn't understand much about the press and even less about the justice system.

"I didn't understand anything about murder until I became the mother of a victim," Mary tells me. We are sitting in the freshly painted front room of her house, the house she will pass on to her surviving son, Theodore, and her three grandchildren.

Mary is plump, with gray-brown hair framing her face the way a valance sets off a window. She will have an unhappy 60th birthday on Sunday.

A "military brat," Mary was born in Maryland, lived in Florida and in El Paso, Texas, before going to a Masonic boarding school in Fort Worth with her siblings through her teenage years.

In 1972, at 18, she moved to Philadelphia to join her mother, a native of Germantown, who had divorced Mary's father.

Working as a nursing assistant, Mary lived in the YWCA on Chestnut Street, where she met Theodore Nicholas, who was dating a girl on the same floor.

"We fell in lust," married quickly and repented at leisure. "The marriage lasted 10 years and 11 days," Mary says, the happy residue being her two sons, reduced to one by Philadelphia's insane murder rate.

Mary and I spoke after publication of my column on the petition for a special prosecutor in the Ferguson, Mo., police shooting. She said she was anxious to sign, and eventually told me a lot more: About her dead son, racist father and a brother who is a retired Texas cop. She had a lot to say.

Mary thinks the Ferguson officer overreacted but knows we are still missing facts. She wants a special prosecutor, "to remove any appearance of conflict of interest." As a mother, she feels that Michael Brown, the unarmed victim, deserves that.

Mary's lived in her predominantly African-American neighborhood for four decades. Her sons, she says, looked Spanish and her husband looked Indian, but all three were hassled by cops. So was Mary, who is white.

"Some were called the N-word by police right in their own neighborhood," her husband was stopped "in innocuous situations" and she "was pulled over for being white in a black neighborhood," more than once.

Erik got stopped constantly because he drove her van, not something any young man would want to be seen in, Mary says.

"Erik said, 'Dag, if I ever get a good job, I'll be late all the time.' "

She smiles at the memory.

Cops eventually made an arrest and the jury hung after a seven-week trial. "They never covered this point on 'Law & Order,' " Mary says with a small laugh.

The shooter was convicted in a second trial and got life.

The trials barely made the papers, maybe because it was black-on-black murder, maybe because there is too much of it to cover.

At least Mary had closure, right?

"Closure is a myth," Mary says. "You'd think after all these years it wouldn't hurt."

The mother of "Murder Victim No. 99 in 2002" says it does.

Phone: 215-854-5977

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