NEW YORK — One day in the summer after Malik Stith’s eighth grade year, he walked to the corner store near his home in Hempstead, N.Y., to get some potato chips.“Some guys were driving by in a car and they shot at him,” recalled Stith’s mother, Tanya Person.
They shot Stith with a BB gun. When he returned home he was rubbing his chest to alleviate the pain.
“It could’ve been a gun,” Person said. “That was it right there. That was sort of a defining moment for me.”
Six weeks later, Person uprooted herself and her two children, Malik and Kayla, and moved to Charlotte, N.C., to seek a safer and more stable life.
(Photo courtesy St. John’s Athletics)
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