THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 28, 1996 TAG: 9604240032
SECTION: REAL LIFE PAGE: K1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY CHARLISE LYLES, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 71 lines
ON APRIL 9, Tarrod Cunningham won a $1,000 scholarship through the Southside Boys and Girls Clubs.
Two days later, he was shot in a fight.
Both events are the latest development in the life of the Park Place youth featured in the March 24 Real Life section as a boy on the border between trouble and glory.
Community activities and church pull him one way. Mean streets and a bad temper yank him the other.
It leaves those who know him asking: Will the bullet that pierced his left hip send him the wrong way? Or will the scholarship lift him to higher ground?
Tarrod, who just turned 18, still vows to win over his temper, the temptations of the street, teachers who irritate him, and friends who run in the wrong crowd.
The recent trouble started on a late afternoon visit to a friend's home in the 1300 block of Canal Drive in Chesapeake's Deep Creek section. A fight erupted, according to police. The friend's sister was arguing with another woman. As the two exchanged blows, Tarrod heard the commotion and went outside.
Apparently thinking that Tarrod was involved in the fight, two men approached and jumped him, according to police.
Then a third man in a car drove up and fired a handgun at Tarrod, hitting him in the left hip and scrotum.
``I guess they figured, we can't beat him, so let's shoot him,'' says Tarrod. ``They thought I was a little punk. People ask me why didn't I run. In the neighborhood I'm living in, you can't be running away.''
He remembers falling to ground, his leg going numb, people hollering and an ambulance screaming.
Word spread fast among the community workers and activists who have nurtured Tarrod into the responsible young man who led clean-up campaigns and a neighborhood festival and won the Youth of the Year Achievement Award for Southside Boys and Girls Clubs.
``I got a call at 11:30 p.m. and me and my wife rushed off to the hospital,'' says Kevin Yearwood, Boys Club director of operations.
``It wasn't anything I was doing bad, just in the wrong place at the wrong time,'' explained Tarrod, who was not seriously wounded. ``I didn't even know them.''
A week later, a limping Tarrod was dressed up and ready to ride to Williamsburg with Yearwood and other contenders for the Youth of the Year state finals.
Tarrod had already beaten local competition to win the $1,000 Hirschler scholarship as the local Boys Club Youth of the Year.
But he lost out in the state finals to Kapila Advani of Richmond, who averaged a 4.0 in school, traveled to South America and tutored public housing residents for GED preparation.
``That's all right,'' says Tarrod. His eyes are still on the prize. He wants to use that $1,000 scholarship to attend Atlanta's Morehouse College, Martin Luther King's alma mater.
He wants Yearwood and all the others who believe in him to know that two bullets won't break their boy.
The incident was just another hurdle in his rough-and-tumble urban world.
``It's a test,'' he says, ``to see whether I can change for real.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by MOTOYA NAKAMURA, The Virginian-Pilot
Tarrod Cunningham, shown singing with his choir, was profiled in the
March 24 Real Life section as a boy on the border between trouble
and glory.
by CNB