Ahmad Abrams was going places. Fresh off graduating high school with honors, he started a job at UPS, but that was only temporary. He was in the process of deciding whether to join the Navy reserves or go straight to one of the many colleges that had accepted him—maybe Pitt, or Pace University in New York, or West Chester where his sister went, or Temple where his grandfather got his master’s.
But those dreams were cut short when he was shot and killed on June 18, 2022 during a robbery near his grandparents house on the 1400 block of North 27th Street. It was the middle the day. He was 18.
The shooter is awaiting trial.
“This kid was phenomenal, a beautiful person and a phenomenal athlete,” said his dad Anthony Abrams.
He grew up in a big family, the fifth out of six siblings, Antonio, Ahyjuenae, Anayah, Anisa and Anita, who shares Ahmad’s birthday. And he loved spending time with them.
He liked to joke around but mostly behaved, though there was that one time that Ahmad wanted something sweet. So he went into the cupboard and pulled out the tub of powdered Hi-C drink mix and ate nearly the whole thing. He ended up in the hospital, but turned out just fine.
Growing up in North Philly, Ahmad stayed out of trouble, in part from his father’s encouragement to get involved in sports at a young age. Starting from only 6 years old he was already playing T-ball. He also got into boxing and basketball, and it was that third sport that stuck.
As he got older, he started playing ball in Philly leagues and later with touring teams throughout Amateur Athletic Union, the same organization that groomed Dr. J Sugar Ray Leonard, his father said with pride.
Ahmad won so many championships his dad had trouble listing them all. Ahmad was the MVP of one tournament the summer before he graduated, and besides excelling in Philly, he played for winning teams in tournaments in California, Delaware, Virginia and Maryland. They retired his jersey at the AAU chapter in Delaware.
“I have one trophy left out of 20 some in the case,” said Anthony, who also lost a cousin to gun violence recently.
Ahmad even won a table tennis championship, but his talent didn’t stop at sports. As a teen he was involved in all sorts of artistic activities, including arts and crafts and drama classes. His father remembers Ahmad running lines with his sister for one performance where he played a bus driver.
Maybe it was his early time in drama class, but Ahmad was a very charismatic person. He knew how to deal with people and displayed leadership skills as a counselor at the Athletic Rec Center where he used to go as a kid. He also spent summers working at the Dell Music Center, part of a program with the Philadelphia Youth Network to ready teens for the workforce.
Facetta Green, who taught financial literacy, remembers Ahmad as an engaged student.
“Ahmad, he started with us when he was 14 years old,” Green told CBS3. “He was a good kid. I didn’t want to believe it, sometimes when the day gets hard it’s not easy handling our youth.”
He even enjoyed working, learning electrical engineering from his grandfather and construction techniques from his dad. He was still a kid, though, and loved all the kinds of stuff kids love, like playing PlayStation, going to Dave and Buster’s, and of course, his mother, Dionne Scott, and is grandparents.
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