Three days after a white supremacist with a semiautomatic rifle massacred 10 Black people at the Tops grocery store on Jefferson Avenue in Buffalo, a couple of dozen children walked one by one to the center of a spacious room at the nearby My Precious Angels Childcare.
They removed their hats, lowered their hoods, placed their hands at their sides and looked their peers in the eyes. Each announced their name, age, school and what they want to be when they grow up, besides an athlete, because of the microscopic odds of making it to the pros.
There’s a future firefighter, barber and dancer.
A scientist, doctor and engineer.
“Say it with your chest!” coach Douglas “Rome” Hunt barked, instilling confidence and respect. “Stop. Hands out of your pockets. Stop walking! Say it with your chest!”
People are also reading…
The group clapped after each child.
Jason L. Washington Jr. was sentenced Wednesday to 25 years in prison plus five years of postrelease supervision for the 2019 double shooting that killed youth football coach Norzell "Nore" Aldridge.
Hunt knows the kids, who are mostly Black, have questions. The 35-year-old father of four has wrestled with the death of his childhood friend and fellow youth football coach since 2019, when Norzell Aldridge was fatally shot by a teenager with a handgun while trying to break up a fight after a game. Two years earlier, another youth football coach, Mario Hayes, was found shot dead four blocks from the field.
This year, Hunt asked many of his youngest and most troubled players to attend his weekly “Building Greatness” mentoring group, a forum he co-founded to provide children with a warm meal, safe space for open dialogue and life skills such as anger management and financial literacy. He was prepared for this session.
Children chatted and chewed pizza in the aftermath of the racist attack, for 10 days the deadliest mass shooting in the United States this year. The earnest group discussion and the weeks of football practice that followed, in preparation for the start of the season and the King of New York tournament this weekend in Rochester, provided a glimpse of childhood intertwined with trauma, revealing the power of inner-city youth sports, importance of role models like Hunt and his tale of redemption amid America’s unending epidemic of gun violence.
Someone was shot nearly once per day on average last year in the City of Buffalo, according to statistics from the Buffalo Police Department. In 2021, 358 people were shot and 59 killed, the highest figures in at least a decade.
This year through June, 143 people were shot and 36 killed, a 22% drop in victims through the first half of the year, according to the most recent data published by the New York Division of Criminal Justice Services.
For Hunt and his players, these are not just statistics.
“I’ve been through when Coach Mario passed away. I’ve been through when Coach Nore passed away. So I have experience,” Hunt said. “And no, I’m not no counselor. I’ve never been to college. I don’t have any degrees. I don’t have none of that. I just know how to be me. I know how to be a human.”
Hunt spent several years in prison on weapons and drug-related charges, beginning when he was a teen, he told The Buffalo News, but earned his GED behind bars, was last released in 2013, according to public records, and in 2014 helped found the Beast Elite Ducks, also known as the GR8 Elite Ducks, a youth football and cheerleading program for children ages 5 to 13 years old. About 200 kids participate. It remains the only group from New York invited to compete in the prestigious “Battle” national championship tournament in Florida, and the 9U team is nationally ranked by Generation Nexxt.
The children attending the mentoring session finished eating and sat together on the carpet.
“We want to see what’s on your minds,” Hunt told the group. “Who knows about what’s been going on in Buffalo? Does anybody want to talk about it?”
A few kids raised their hands. They had heard about the murders.
“Do you know how many people?” Hunt asked.
“Did anybody see anything or watch anything on social media?”
“Who actually seen it? The video going around?”
More hands.
“What did you see?”
“And he started killing people?”
“What did you see?”
“The gun said the N-word on it?”
“How does that make y’all feel?” Hunt said. “Sad?”
The children nodded.
“How many people seen the president come here today?”
More hands.
In the corner sat the Rev. Julian Cook, dean of Houghton College and senior pastor of Macedonia Baptist Church of Buffalo.
“I actually got to see President Biden this morning,” Cook told the children, “and had the chance to talk to him a little bit about what we need on the ground here. But this is the highlight of my day, to be with y’all.”
A half-dozen grief counselors lined one side of the room.
“Speak freely,” Felicia Williamson, the owner of the child care center, told the kids. “Do not let anyone’s presence intimidate how you’re feeling.”
Authorities say the alleged shooter, Payton Gendron, then 18, drove 200 miles from rural Broome County to one of the densest Black ZIP codes in New York, used a legally bought but illegally modified semi-automatic rifle, wore body armor and livestreamed the attack with a camera on his helmet. He posted online a 180-page screed claiming his motivation stemmed from the “great replacement,” a far-right wing conspiracy theory that immigrants and minorities are replacing white Americans.
“When you guys heard about the shooting, from friends and family or the TV, what did you immediately start feeling?” a counselor asked. “That it’s not safe? I felt the same thing. And there are ways to work through that. Who knows what coping skills are?”
The shooter surrendered to police outside the store and remains held without bail on 52 state and federal charges, including murder, domestic terrorism and hate crimes. He pleaded not guilty to all counts.
“Let me ask y’all a question,” Hunt said. “So, being that he did what he did, do y’all think he should get the death penalty?”
“Yes!” the children shouted.
“Wait! Wait!” Hunt said. “Or, do you think he should spend the rest of his life in jail?”
The kids debated.
“If he spends the rest of his life in jail and he’s part of a gang,” Hunt said, “he’s going to live comfortably. And if he gets the death penalty, it’s kind of like a cop-out, because he dies instantly.
“Maybe I shouldn’t be telling y’all too much about jail.”
Time served
Hunt, a stocky man with a bushy beard, cherub face and charcoal eyes, grew up one block from the Ducks’ home field behind Harvey Austin Elementary School on Koons Avenue.
He was arrested three times on weapons possession charges, first as a boy at Buffalo Raiders youth football practice, then in high school, then as an adult.
“We had problems in that area and I didn’t want to be scared to go to football practice,” Hunt said about the first incident, “so I took a gun with me.”
Somebody snitched.
Hunt spent a day in county lockup, but the Raiders welcomed him back.
Once he aged out as a player, Hunt joined the coaching staff, each day heading from high school practice to the park. His senior year, Hunt said he was again caught with a gun on his way to a party. He spent the next year locked up, while his high school teammates lost a playoff game and graduated without him.
Once released, he resumed coaching youth football. And was arrested on gun and drug charges.
Public records show Hunt was busted in 2008 for criminal possession of a weapon in the second degree, a felony in New York State, and in 2009 by federal agents for selling the party drugs MDMA and BZP, a felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison and a $1 million fine.
In 2010, Hunt agreed to cooperate with federal investigators and plead guilty to his role in the drug-dealing conspiracy.
In 2011, he was sentenced to time served. But the state gun charge was another matter.
Hunt was 26 years old and a father of three when he was last released from prison in 2013.
He has since had a fourth child.
“That’s my main focus in life,” Hunt said. “I couldn’t keep jeopardizing not being able to be a father.”
Hunt poured himself back into coaching youth football and paid the bills with a job at Budget Rent a Car.
In 2014, he and a group of coaches left the Raiders and joined the nearby Buffalo Jets. Many of their players followed. And inspired by the flashy uniforms of the University of Oregon, the programs merged to become the Beast Elite Ducks.
The organization fields six teams, divided by age, and with a deep talent pool came to dominate the local youth football scene, displacing the since-disbanded God’s Children Cowboys as the top program in Western New York.
In 2019, Hunt posted on Facebook a photo of himself draped in Ducks gear and a half-dozen championship belts.
“I tell the kids all the time that they helped save my life,” Hunt said. “I dedicated so much of my time to them that I didn’t have time to do other things that I’m not supposed to do.”
He doesn’t often share details of his criminal past.
“I always tell all the parents that I was ‘rough around the edges,’ ” Hunt said. “I deal with the troubled kids, the ones that have issues at home, the ones that’s not very cooperative. Because I was once that kid, so I understand how they feel and how they think.”
When Hayes, the Ducks’ first president, was shot dead in an unsolved crime only blocks from the field in February 2017, Kenya Peoples ascended to the top role.
“I think we’re changing lives,” Peoples, 48, said after a recent practice. “That’s the most important thing. You’ve got children that, had they not had this outlet, they’d be doing just about anything. And a lot of times, idle minds lead to trouble.”
Hunt was promoted to vice president.
One day, he recalled being shaken by a young boy’s admiration.
“Coach Rome, I want to be just like you when I grow up,” the kid said. “I want to work for Budget.”
“And I’m like, ‘No, you don’t want to work for Budget! Budget is not, like, a career job!’ ” Hunt said. “So that triggered me to figure out a way I can get a career.”
In 2018, Hunt earned a Class A commercial driver’s license.
Now he drives a tractor trailer.
‘Like family to me’
Punches began flying after the Ducks’ game against the GC Cowboys on Aug. 31, 2019, a rowdy summer afternoon at Emerson Park.
Hunt had diffused fights all day.
“I said, ‘Man, Nore. It’s your turn, man. I’m tired,’ ” Hunt recalled. “So the roles would have been reversed.”
Aldridge, 36, was trying to break up a fistfight between a 20-year-old former Ducks player, Shaun Faulk, and another man, whose cousin pulled a revolver and shot Faulk in the shoulder, prosecutors told a jury in March in Erie County Court.
Jason L. Washington Jr., then 17, had already fired once and was still aiming at Faulk when Aldridge swung a helmet at the shooter, hitting him in the head, video evidence corroborated at trial.
Washington turned toward Aldridge, pulled the trigger twice more and ran off.
“It sounded like firecrackers,” said Douglas Hunt Jr., then 12 years old.
A bullet struck Aldridge in his left side, piercing his spleen, pancreas and aorta.
But Faulk’s wound gushed worse.
“Nobody thought Nore was going to die,” the elder Hunt said. “He was talking.
“I’m like, ‘Nore, just keep pressure on it.’
Aldridge slumped and gasped. “Ah, I got it.”
“I said, ‘Nore, stay woke!’ I’m like, ‘Yo, y’all got to keep him woke!’
“He’s like, ‘Bruh, I’m good, bruh.’
Surveillance video from a tire store at the corner of Koons and Sycamore showed, at 7:13 p.m., a silver pickup truck speeding over the grass and sidewalk, past police vehicles, whisking Faulk to Erie County Medical Center, about 2½ miles away.
Right behind the truck, a red SUV transporting Aldridge stopped near a police car in the intersection.
He exited the vehicle and collapsed.
“When the police stopped him, they made everybody get out the car and put that man on the ground, shot,” Hunt said. “They seen that he was shot. They tried to look for a gun. There wasn’t no gun. They let him get back in the car and let him pull off and they didn’t give him an escort.”
Faulk was treated at ECMC and released. Aldridge, a father of five, died overnight at the hospital.
“I broke down hard,” Hunt said.
Norzell Aldridge’s friends are asking if the football coach would be alive if not for a stop that took up to two minutes en route to
In March, Washington, now 20, testified he was acting in self-defense when he shot Faulk and Aldridge. He was found guilty of first-degree manslaughter, second-degree criminal possession of a weapon and second-degree assault.
In June, Washington was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
A jury found Jason L. Washington Jr. guilty of first-degree manslaughter, second-degree assault and second-degree weapons possession in the 2019 shooting death of Norzell "Nore" Aldridge, 36, and the wounding of Shawn Faulk, 20.
Aldridge was a longtime presence in local youth football circles. He picked up five kids each day on the way to practice, enjoyed joking around and subscribed to the old adage, “look good, play good.”
Carter Allen, 26, helped Aldridge coach the Ducks’ 10- and 11-year-olds that season.
“He’s the one the kids wanted to go to to get soothed and babied,” Allen said, “because they all loved Coach Nore. Everybody can’t yell, because sometimes it might break kids down. You need the person that’s going to build them back up. And he was that person.”
Peoples, the team president, wears “Nore” and the letters “R.I.H.” – short for “Rest In Heaven” – stitched into the front of a green Ducks hoodie.
“He lost his life trying to save a life,” People said. “It’s tragic.”
To this day, some kids practice in purple jerseys with “Nore” on the nameplate.
“He was like family to me,” said Marquis Carmichael, 13, who played quarterback for Aldridge’s team. “I was hurt. I didn’t want to play after that. But I decided that we had to play for him. Some kids just left and didn’t ever come back.”
Three days after the shooting, the Ducks’ players, coaches, parents and grief counselors gathered at the field.
The team held a vigil and released balloons into the sky.
Two days later, Aldridge was buried.
The Ducks returned to practice the next week.
“We all cried,” Allen said. “And another coach there with us basically said, ‘Yo, we can’t just sit around crying. We’ve got to move forward and progress.’ ”
Three of the Ducks’ teams won United Youth Football League national championships later that season in Florida, while Aldridge’s shorthanded group traveled and competed.
Five months later, in February 2020, the city held a small dedication ceremony and bolted a metal sign to a utility pole at the corner of Koons and Sycamore:
“This route designated as Norzell D. Aldridge Way.”
A brown teddy bear and photo of Aldridge remain bound to the pole with plastic wrap.
‘Life is about choices’
Hours after President Biden and first lady Jill Biden added a bouquet of flowers to the memorial outside the Tops grocery store in May, the Ducks tried to sort through the mass shooting and its reverberations.
“There’s racist people in the area, in the country, that will act like he’s some kind of hero,” Ducks volunteer Mark Kramer, a white man and co-founder of the mentoring group, told the children.
Other stores in the region closed because of terroristic threats.
“Do you guys know what racist means?” a counselor asked. “It’s not people that don’t like Black people. It’s people that are different than you. Not necessarily Black or white. There are racist people out there that just don’t like any race that’s not their own.”
A boy asked about Aaron Salter Jr., the Tops security guard killed in the massacre.
Williamson, the child care owner, knew him personally.
“The security guard was also a retired lieutenant with the Buffalo Police Department,” Williamson told the children. “He was shooting back at him, which distracted him from killing other people, even though it didn’t pierce his armor. But he prevented other lives from being lost, which means he died a hero.”
The conversation bounced from how to act around police officers – don’t run and always show respect – to social justice, bullying, snitching, food deserts, systemic racism and the whitewashing of American history.
“Don’t think that everyone of that race is that way,” a counselor said. “Just treat people kindly and get to know people for who they are, and don’t assume that everyone is bad or assume that because you’re Black, you’re one way. There are some really good people out there.”
“I want to give a round of applause to that,” Hunt said.
The group clapped.
They talked about critical thinking and free will.
“Life is about choices. Right?” a counselor said. “You chose what to wear today. You chose to eat pizza with cheese or pepperoni. We can choose good or evil.”
They talked about voting.
“You have to be the one to make the change,” Hunt said. “Your vote does count. But it won’t count if you go down the wrong path and they take away your right to vote.”
“Don’t vote for the person that everybody else is voting for just because,” Williamson said. “If Coach Rome runs for president ...”
“Who thinks I’d be a good president?” Hunt blurted.
Little hands raised and laughter filled the room.
A knee in the grass
The Ducks took a week off from practice after the Tops massacre and reconvened the following Monday.
“We are in a public park and they said they were targeting other areas,” Hunt said. “People are scared to death right now.”
Children stretched on large rocks and ran through overgrown grass and dandelions. The uneven football field where the team plays, which floods, had been mowed by the city for the first time since last fall.
The Ducks charge $250 a kid for the season, which covers uniforms, travel and game-day officials, plus another $350, if necessary, for a weeklong season-ending trip to Florida for nationals.
Some families don’t have it.
The Ducks don’t like to turn anyone away. They host fundraisers and receive donations but operate on a “shoestring budget,” Peoples said. Once, he took out a personal loan to keep the program running and paid it back from his own pocket, he said. A full season costs “$60,000, easy.”
Participation dipped after Aldridge’s death and through the Covid-19 pandemic. The group at mentoring after the Tops shooting was half its usual size.
“This community has experienced unprecedented trauma,” Cook said, relaying the story of an 8-year-old boy who’s unable to sleep, haunted since witnessing the massacre from an apartment window across the street. “That 8-year-old is going to need support for a long time. And one of those supports that he can have available to him are things like this sports league. If we cannot talk to them, if we cannot assure these babies, these children, that they are safe, then we have failed.”
Shye’vere Perkins, 11, attends Buffalo Academy of Science and wants to be an archaeologist.
“I was scared because the Tops, I go there a lot,” Shye’vere said.
Brandon Rochester, 8, attends Maryvale Intermediate School and wants to be a firefighter.
“You’ve got to have bravery, confidence,” Brandon said about each child standing and introducing themselves to the group. “That’s why we go to mentoring.”
Robert Day, 7, attends Buffalo United Charter School and wants to be a police officer.
“Buffalo is like a bad place because all bad things happen,” Robert said. “I really want to leave but I can’t leave my brothers out here. I really just can’t, because I love my brothers so much.”
Hunt, unfiltered, guided a group of kids through warmups and team drills.
He was teaching power running plays, a youth football staple.
“You need to get your (backside) out the backfield faster,” he shouts. “One second through the hole! Hurry up! Hurry up! Hurry up!”
A new kid, Cedrick, was crying.
He was struggling to learn the play.
Less than two weeks earlier, he and his younger brother had been in the Tops during the shooting, his mother told the Ducks’ coaches.
“She was like, ‘We were behind the chip aisle and I was just clutching my babies,’ ” Peoples said.
The woman declined to speak with The News, saying she was trying to forget the experience.
Hunt had taken her boys aside at the start of practice to explain some basics.
Now he takes Cedrick aside again.
“Tears are not going to stop this,” Hunt tells the boy. “Do you want to quit right now? Do you want this? Do you want to be good or be great?”
The Ducks run the play again.
“That’s it! That’s it!” Hunt shouts. “That’s what I want right there. Clap that up!”
The children cheer and applaud.
“That’s the difference between us and them,” Hunt tells the group. “Somebody else could run this play but they won’t run it like us.”
The kids gather around Hunt and take a knee in the grass.
“Anybody new, come to the front,” Hunt said. “Hurry up! Hurry up! Hurry up! You’ve got to say your name, your age, what school you go to and what you want to be when you grow up. You can’t say nothing sports.”
The next day, 19 children and two teachers are murdered by an 18-year-old man with a semiautomatic rifle at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, the new deadliest mass shooting in the U.S. this year. Hunt has the Ducks at mentoring clip pictures from magazines to make vision boards, collages depicting their hopes and dreams, imagining their futures.
Now, back at practice, Cedrick stands before his new teammates in the grass.
“What did he say his name was?” Hunt asked the group.
“Cedrick,” the kids said.
“What’s his name?”
“Cedrick.”
“What’s his name?”
“Cedrick!”
“Say it again.”
“CEDRICK!”
“Clap him in!”