MICHAEL “MIKE-MIKE” KERRY SMITH III, 18, DEC. 10, 1987 – MAY 12, 2006
You lost your baby
Breeshell Devine sighs, laying her head on her outstretched arm, unconsciously reaching toward her son’s usual spot on the couch. She is interrupted by a child from her neighborhood, Alonzo “Pappy” Brown, who pokes his head around the door jam. She motions for him to come in and wraps him with a bear hug.
“Pappy was there,” Breeshell, 34, says nodding toward the 8-year-old boy in her arms.
“I was where?” Pappy asks.
“There that day with Mike-Mike,” she explains.
The little boy’s smile disappears. It’s always this way when Devine and Pappy talk about her son, Michael “Mike-Mike” Kerry Smith III, who was shot and killed two months ago.
“He was playing with me and Deon just before he went to the store,” Pappy says flatly. “But then he got shot.”
A photo sits on top of Devine’s entertainment center in her living room at Citrus Grove Apartments. It shows five friends standing together, laughing. Three of them are dead now, her son among them.
Not long after Mike’s death, Pappy came to Breeshell and asked her: “Can I be your God baby because you lost your baby?”
Mama’s boy
On May 11, 2006, Mike-Mike Smith was hanging with friends in the parking lot of Citrus Grove Apartments. The evening had drawn residents of the 84-unit complex out for some relief from the day’s heat. Adults sat in chairs on the sidewalk, teenagers sat on cars and children played games on the lawn.
Mike stood with his best friend, David Norfleet, 18, and another friend, Phillip Peterson. Best friends since third grade, David and Mike experienced life side by side. Norfleet says Mike would confide in him when he fell in love, complain to him when his girlfriend annoyed him and ask advice when he’d argued with his mom.
Now as they chatted together on this night, a Dodge Durango, later identified as stolen, cruised up Seventh Avenue South and stopped abruptly in front of them.
Witnesses said young men in the car started cursing at Mike and the others in the lot, and shouting “Childs Park,” a neighborhood east of 34th Street that has an ongoing rivalry with Bethel Heights, which includes Citrus Grove. They say one of the men in the car, Demarlis “Money” Melvin, 18, threatened to return with a gun.
Mike didn’t know Melvin or the others in the car, which sped off after the brief verbal confrontation. He and his friends shrugged off the threat.
But Devine had heard the commotion from her chair on the sidewalk in the back of the complex. She called her son on his cell phone. He promised to come right home.
He never got the chance.
The Durango returned, according to witnesses. Melvin was in the back seat with a gun, they say. By the time Mike and his friends saw the barrel, it was too late.
David Norfleet made it behind a wall that separated the parking lot from the street. But when he returned, Phillip Peterson and Mike Smith were on the ground.
A bullet had torn through the bill of Peterson’s cap, but didn’t harm him.
The other bullet hit Mike in the head.
At 6:29 p.m., Devine dialed her son’s cell phone again. This time, he didn’t answer. He was already brain dead.
The family took him off life support the day after he was shot and donated his organs. The death certificate lists the date of death as May 12, but for those who loved Mike, the date will always be one day earlier.
“That’s why he died to us on the 11th when he got shot,” Erika Harrington, his godmother, says. “He was there physically but he wasn’t there with us anymore.”
A mother’s tug of war
A month before her 16th birthday, Breeshell Devine held her first child in her arms after almost 13 hours of labor. She had no way of knowing then that he would be her only child, that he would become the rudder in her life, or that he would be taken from her so soon.
“It’s hard, she says. “I’m trying to be the strong woman I know I can be.”
Devine raised her son alone. Her relationship with Smith’s father, Michael Kerry Smith Jr., had ended before she gave birth. Over the years, Smith was in and out of Mike’s life. He paid child support, but wasn’t a constant presence. And over the years, Devine struggled with the demands of motherhood. More than a decade ago, she was charged with petty theft; on another occasion it was writing a bad check.
“When I got into trouble it was me trying to make ends meet,” she says. “I know it was the wrong way but there had to be some way. Now it’s a whole different time frame. Then I was still young and stubborn, trying to make it on my own the wrong way instead of trying to get the right kind of help.”
Devine picked out her son’s casket alone.
Mike-Mike
Devine says if she could do it all over again she’d have a houseful of kids, because her house is hauntingly empty now. The emptiness makes her drink more than she likes, she says. She still hasn’t put away Mike’s clothes from the laundry basket. He used to leave her notes around the house telling her he loved her. She still can’t take them out to read them. Two of his watches are on his dresser, lying on their sides, unclasped. Next to them are his cologne bottles.
“Mike was a smell-good person,” Devine says. “He loved his colognes.”
Every night before bed, Devine still talks to Mike – a habit left over from when he was alive. Breeshell called him her “backbone,” someone to turn to when she got overwhelmed. It was Mike who gave her the courage recently to pursue charges against an abuser from her childhood, a decision she had grappled with for months.
Friends and relatives remember Mike as serious, but kind.
In an old football photo Smith took as a kid, his mouth is shut and his lips are set in a tight line. He wouldn’t talk to anyone he didn’t know. His seriousness was read by those who didn’t know him as something more fierce.
“This is how Mike walked around,” Devine says. “That’s why people were intimidated.”
But with those he knew, he was generous and even goofy. He aggravated his aunts and uncles by “borrowing” their clothing or food, but they could never stay mad long.
“If it was gone, Mike did it,” his aunt Ashia Holmes says, laughing.
He sometimes took neighborhood children to the park or to get ice cream. He loved flag football and played in multiple leagues. The night he died, he missed an awards ceremony.
“He’d always be out there practicing,” says friend Naisha Saylor, 17. “He’d sit outside trying to get people to race him.”
His home was a hang out for his friends. His mother doted on them, cooking them big meals.
Devine hasn’t cooked a big meal since he died.
Mike’s girlfriend, Zaneta Howlett, 18, says he was a math whiz who often spoke of God. She loved Mike because he pushed her to do her best. Even after he dropped out of Osceola High School, Mike encouraged her to finish. She did and plans to become an anesthesiologist, like she always dreamed.
He wasn’t always good at taking his own advice. He had been arrested twice for smoking marijuana. One of the probation requirements was to return to school and get a job. But most say he went to Life Skills Center in Pinellas County because Devine pressured him.
Mike’s ambitions were focused on his diploma. He wanted a college degree, but he also dreamed of playing pro football like his uncle, Deandrew Rubin, who plays for the Detroit Lions. Mostly he wanted a good job, with good money, so he could help Breeshell buy a house and she could quit her job as a housekeeper at the Howard Johnson’s in St. Pete Beach. Maybe then she could open a massage therapy shop.
“He just wanted to take care of his mom, period,” Devine says.
Mike had once told Zaneta that if he ever made it big, he planned to tear down Citrus Grove and make it a safe place for the community. He wanted to hire private security guards, who would protect residents.
“I wish it would’ve happened a year or two down the road if he had to be taken from me. So at least I could have seen how he changed,” Devine reflects. “He was trying so hard, but he hadn’t gotten to see the results yet.
“At least I know in my heart where his heart was at.”
How do you break the cycle?
Mike didn’t look for trouble; he just asked to be respected. He was 5-feet-9, but weighed 170 pounds, most of which was muscle.
“He’d only get mad if someone messed with his mom or went out of their way to directly mess with him,” said Thyra Flowers, a neighbor and the grandmother of one of Mike’s small cousins.
Many say this is why Melvin, who has been charged with first-degree murder, may have gone to get a gun that night – some sense that he had been challenged by Mike, and needed to respond.
Melvin’s pre-trial hearing is set for July 17. The driver of the car hasn’t been found. The two other passengers already have agreed to testify against Melvin.
But as the courts do their job, Devine is trying to do hers. She joined other grieving mothers to campaign on the streets against gun violence, “because I didn’t like the way my baby was gunned down for nothing.”
The bad days are frequent, but the community has rallied around her.
Jessica Bobbit, 20, a neighbor who lives upstairs from Devine’s apartment at Citrus Grove and is raising her own baby, can sense the depth of Devine’s grief, anger and helplessness. Not too long ago, she realizes, Mike was just a toddler himself, scrambling around and laughing like her son, Jaylen, does now.
What if she raised him, only to lose him?
“It’s scary because Breeshell can count down to the last second of her child’s life,” Bobbit says. “For any single mother it is so scary to raise a young boy here. It is sad; you are scared to see your child grow up. You want to keep him little and shelter him forever.”
NAVIGATION:
Introduction
Part 1: Antonio “Pacman” Roberts
Part 2: Forbes “P-nut” Swisher
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Part 3: Michael “Mike-Mike” Kerry Smith III
Interested in more? Click here to see the multimedia presentation, “Mother’s love, mother’s anguish.”
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