Ten seconds.
Another 10 seconds, maybe 20, and Blake Bozeman, in all likelihood, would have been out of the CRU lounge in northeast Washington, D.C., on Sept. 23. He would have gotten into his car and gotten on with his life. It was an emerging life.
Bozeman played college basketball from 2011 to 2015 at Morgan State University for his father, Todd, the longtime college coach and NBA scout. Blake earned a bachelor’s degree in marketing and a master’s degree in journalism from Morgan. He’d started a business, the Pivot Group, which helped student-athletes make the transition from athletics to the business world. He also worked in real estate. Blake married his longtime girlfriend, Tiera, in July. The couple had three children.
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But Blake didn’t get those extra 10 seconds.
He was leaving a birthday party for one of his friends that September night when someone pulled out a gun just before midnight and fired inside the club, on its second floor. Four people were shot. Three of them suffered non-life-threatening injuries.
Blake Bozeman, 31, was not among the fortunate. He was shot and died at a local hospital soon after being taken there. His death shattered his family and the local hoops community, most of which, it seems, knew and loved him.
“It happened a block from my house,” Howard University basketball coach Kenny Blakeney said Tuesday. “I saw the police cars and everything moving in my neighborhood, not knowing what had happened — until I got the text message from Tyler Thornton the next morning.”
Thornton is on Blakeney’s staff at Howard as an assistant coach and director of player development. He played AAU ball with Bozeman when they were younger. Blakeney had known Blake since he was 12 or 13. Blakeney and Duane Simpkins, the new head coach at American University, were teammates for two seasons at DeMatha Catholic High School, the historic basketball powerhouse in Maryland. The hoops tentacles in and around town run deep.
Unfortunately, Bozeman’s murder cut through the brotherhood. The basketball community can only do so much. But it tried to at least call attention to everything Tuesday night at Howard.
At Burr Gymnasium, Howard and American, longtime local rivals, played an exhibition game a week before each school begins its regular season to honor Bozeman, raise awareness about the spike in gun violence around D.C., and raise money for the Far Southeast Family Strengthening Collaborative. All ticket sales Tuesday went to the FSFSC, whose many programs address issues that local families who’ve been harmed by crime, struggled with homelessness or needed help staying connected with one another face every day.
Howard and American played an important exhibition game Tuesday night, bringing awareness about gun violence and honoring Blake Bozeman. (David Aldridge / The Athletic)According to D.C. police statistics, homicides have gone up dramatically in the city this year. They weren’t all gun-related, but the spike in deaths is clear. How can you look at this list of unsolved killings in the city for 2023 alone and not be moved? Those aren’t “statistics.” Those are people who have loved ones who miss them and friends who had long-standing relationships with them.
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No one person or group can stem the tide in a given year. No one person or group can accurately explain why crime goes up one year and down the next, or why it does so in one city and not another. (For what it’s worth, violent crimes, as D.C. police define them, actually went down in the city in September, when Blake Bozeman was killed.) Almost anyone — the mayor, the police, the city council, your local paper, the guy sitting next to you at the bar — who says they know why crime fluctuates from year to year doesn’t know for certain. Or, they’re being paid to lie to you to make you afraid and to vote accordingly.
But in D.C. this year, most of the numbers are pointing in the wrong direction. A construction worker on a job near Howard’s campus was shot and killed in August, before most students arrived for the fall semester. After a shooting at Morgan’s campus during the school’s homecoming week, after which weekend festivities were postponed, American announced it was considering arming its campus security guards — a stunning potential escalation of force for a college in Ward 3, where most of the city’s richest people live and where violent crime is very rare.
“Being from the area, I’ve got a younger brother, parents, grandparents in the area,” said American senior guard Colin Smalls, who is from nearby Upper Marlboro, Md. “It’s really tough to think about, because it’s such a major issue. I worry about my mother often. She does a lot of traveling, in and out of D.C. My brother … just make sure he’s around the right people, not getting involved around those type of things.”
Todd and TeLethea Bozeman came to the game, as did local government officials and others who wanted to show up for the family.
I couldn’t interview Todd and TeLethea on Tuesday. Todd’s eyes were red; TeLethea was, of course, crestfallen. All I could do was hug them.
I make no pretense of objectivity here. I’ve known Todd Bozeman for more than 20 years. Like Blakeney and Simpkins, I went to and graduated from DeMatha. I am a proud AU graduate and a sick fan of AU’s teams. (It’s the only time I say “we” about a sports team.) I wanted to be there for the family, and my alma mater, and Simpkins, and Howard — which won the MEAC Tournament last spring and made the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 1992. The Bison, under Blakeney, have been intentional in being a part of the D.C. community above and beyond basketball.
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“We’re working with some professors at the university that are working in the space of the carceral state, trying to see how we can make a real impact on the youth,” said Howard guard Jelani Williams, a graduate student and local product (Sidwell Friends High School) who suffered three ACL tears while playing at Penn.
Blakeney and Simpkins already had planned for their teams to scrimmage each other during the summer. They needed a cause. Unfortunately, they got one.
“We were already leaning into something with juveniles or gun prevention,” Blakeney said. “When the tragedy struck, it was just an automatic, ‘Yeah, this is what we’re doing,’ and we both didn’t even hesitate. It was like, yeah, let’s move forward with it.”
Said Simpkins: “We wanted to wrap our arms around the Bozeman family and do something for them. It’s for a great cause. Obviously, it’s in honor of him. But Far Southeast is a tremendous organization that means a lot to me. I grew up about four or five blocks from there, and they have all the right intentions. The two of those things, you put them together, we’re going to do something good for both.
“What’s so crazy was, the following week, week and a half later, you had the incident at Morgan State. My son was 20 feet away from that kid who was doing the shooting. My son’s friend got shot in the wrist and in the foot, and my son’s ducking around and everything. Fast forward to a week later, and they’re doing the homegoing ceremony up at Morgan. It’s literally next door to where my son’s dorm is and where the shooting occurred. All of that stuff, that hit me hard.”
There was a moment of silence for Bozeman before Tuesday’s tipoff. Howard’s dance team performed an original piece at halftime in his honor. The Bison beat American in a spirited, if uneven, scrimmage. The hugs and daps afterward seemed more heartfelt.
It was getting cold out. Back into the city that we all love, but whose worst instincts too often reach into unexpected places at the worst time, and which cause so much pain and suffering to the innocent and emerging.
The family of Blake Bozeman has set up a scholarship fund for his three children. Click here to contribute.
(Top photo: David Aldridge / The Athletic)
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