Family: Ja'Meer Bullard saved a friend from getting shot
Loud talking. Gunfire. "Oh, s-! Get out of the way!" Then a faint voice calling, "Help." Liz, a 44-year-old resident of the Gateway neighborhood in Camden, heard the confrontation on Mechanic Street as midnight Friday gave way to Saturday morning.
Loud talking. Gunfire. "Oh, s-! Get out of the way!" Then a faint voice calling, "Help."
Liz, a 44-year-old resident of the Gateway neighborhood in Camden, heard the confrontation on Mechanic Street as midnight Friday gave way to Saturday morning.
She looked outside and saw someone helping a person on the ground struggling to get up. Immediately, she called 911. By the time she ran outside, police and paramedics were already there.
That's when she saw a young man, shaking and struggling to hold himself up, lock eyes with her. To her horror, it was her 18-year-old cousin Ja'Meer Bullard.
"I just went blank," she said.
Liz, who is afraid to give her last name, said Sunday she ran around the corner to find her cousin and Bullard's father, Jesse Kato, to give him the awful news that his son had been shot.
The gunfire was also picked up by Camden's ShotSpotter system, a network of microphones that hear and report gunfire. By the time Liz and Kato raced back to Bullard's side, police and medics had blocked off the area.
Bullard, a star football player at Woodrow Wilson High School newly transferred to Camden High, was pronounced dead minutes later at Cooper University Hospital.
"My family is not the same," said Liz.
The distraught family believes Bullard was with a 16-year-old childhood friend when trouble arrived on Mechanic Street. An older man walking by told the family he heard Bullard tell the younger teen to run just before gunfire struck Bullard in the back.
Jesse and Katrina Kato moved their family to the two-story rowhouse on Liberty street - a bigger place for their four children - a year ago. Outside that home on Sunday, Katrina Kato sat on the stoop, her face contorted in grief.
"He didn't want to leave," she said over and over. "I wanted my kids to have better. You can't control the people around us."
Family members surrounded her with love and support.
She said she wanted to leave the neighborhood but her son, very family oriented and loyal, did not.
Instead, he wanted to stay to finish school and pursue his football career.
His dream? Being able to one day buy his mother a house, become a pediatrician, and move the family out of the neighborhood.
"He loved his mom and his dad," said his father. "But he was a mama's boy."
Camden High School football coach David Savage said he had expected Bullard to play for Camden in his senior year next season after his stellar years with Woodrow Wilson. Bullard already had the attention of college recruiters from Temple and other schools.
"He was a throwback football player," Savage said. "He had a nose for the football as a linebacker and he was a tough runner as a fullback. Our kids all knew him. The city is small. They're all shaken up."
And to his family, Bullard was a hero. They believe he saved the life of his young friend.
"He pushed him out the way and told him to run," said one of Bullard's paternal aunts. She, too, was reluctant to be identified.
The family said the teenage friend who managed to escape was safe but frightened.
With no arrests in the case by Sunday afternoon, whoever killed Bullard remains at large.
Camden County Prosecutor's Office spokesman Andy McNeil said Sunday night he could not comment on the specifics of the investigation or on the family's account.
Bullard's death, the eighth homicide in Camden this year, happened weeks after another 18-year-old from Camden, Tyimer Bright, was fatally gunned down outside a party on the city border, in Haddon Township. There have been no arrests in that April 5 shooting.
"We're probing for connections between the cases," McNeil said. "We haven't determined whether there are any ties at this point."
Jesse Kato was silent in shock beside his wife, his eyes red from crying.
Their greatest hope, they said almost in unison: Find the person who killed their son.
"They need to turn themselves in," said Liz, her eyes welling with tears. "I don't want anyone else to get hurt."
Outside Liz's stoop, melted wax dotted the concrete leading to a collection of unlit candles. Over a nearby fence, a white fitted sheet was draped with the phrases "I love you, Meer!" and "I miss you so much!" A ripped piece of caution tape littered a patch of grass.
Nearly 100 people showed up for a vigil at 8 a.m. Saturday, just hours after Bullard died. Family, friends, neighbors, and strangers gathered to pray, sing, and console.
"They took my baby," said Bullard's mother. "I'm out of here."
Bullard's family says his legacy lives on through his three siblings: an older and younger brother and a younger sister.
"Words can't express what we think about Ja'Meer," said an aunt. "No matter what, he's our world. He's our angel."