A survivor's story ends with a fatal blast in Feltonville

At 2 years old, Izzadeen Burgos had beaten the odds.

He had lost his left arm at the shoulder in a shotgun blast that also punctured his lung and nearly killed him. His father, who fired the gun and insisted the shooting was an accident, was sentenced to eight to 20 years in prison.

The 1996 case captivated the city. Local news outlets assiduously monitored his condition. Strangers showed up at the boy's hospital room, telling his stricken family that the Lord had asked them to pray for him.

Izzy, as his family calls him, pulled through. He grew up, took up boxing, got his high school diploma and a part-time job at a barbershop. And he rekindled a relationship with his father, Dennis. The two became close after his release from prison.

Izzy was with his father Sunday night when someone walked up to them on Wingohocking Street in Feltonville and fired a shot into the younger man's face. Dennis Burgos, police said, chased his son's assailant down the street. Izzy was taken to Temple University Hospital, where he died.

His mother, Lisa, who had sat by her son's hospital bed 19 years ago, was in her house just a block away when the shooting happened.

She ran around the corner to see her son motionless on the street, and fell to the ground.

"I couldn't even go over," she said, wiping away tears at her home Monday afternoon.

Her son had endured a difficult upbringing with steely determination, she said.

At age 10, he and a friend walked into a local boxing clinic run by Bo Diaz, a former Philadelphia police officer who mentored youths in his spare time. Izzy's friend wanted to learn to box. Izzy, normally gregarious, was suddenly shy and self-conscious. He told Diaz he couldn't box with one arm.

"I said, 'Why can't you?' " Diaz recalled Monday. He gave Izzy a glove and paired him off. "And then we realized, this kid can take a fight."

In 2005, Izzy fought in an exhibition game at the Legendary Blue Horizon. ESPN published a feature on the three-round bout. He was knocked down in the first round, but got back up and held his own.

"There were grown men, union men, watching and crying," Diaz said. "It was like a real Rocky."

But when he tried to enter youth boxing tournaments, he was turned down because of his disability. He drifted from the gym. Diaz last saw him five years ago. Izzy told him, with a grin, that he was thinking of boxing again.

"Everywhere he went, he made friends," Lisa Burgos said. Her son's late teens were difficult - he served stints in prison on assault and drug charges - but he had been "released from all that," she said. He would close conversations with his social worker by thanking her for listening to him.

"He had a good heart," Lisa said. Lately, she said, he had been talking about mentoring young kids - "telling them that the streets are not the way." Telling them to make the right choices.

A motive in her son's killing is unclear, and the gunman is at large. Dennis chased the shooter for a block before the man turned, fired at him, and ran off, police said.

Ever a fighter, Izzy clung to life at the hospital for about 21/2 hours. He was pronounced dead at 1:29 Monday morning.

"You could see the determination in him, the will," Diaz said. "And to get killed like that - it shouldn't have happened."

215-854-2961@aubreyjwhelan