The grass never grew under Khayyan Fruster’s feet, as his grandmother likes to say, and that motivation would have propelled him into the police department.
But he never got the chance to join the academy.
Khayyan was shot dead on Jan. 13, 2017, outside his home in the Tacony section of Philadelphia while waiting for a ride to his job as a tow-truck driver. He was 28.
“He was always working a few jobs, you know, trying to maintain,” said his grandmother, Marie Fruster.
Khayyan also worked nights as a bail bondsman, a second job that was intended to help him get a new house where he could live with his two boys, Khayyan and Kayden, and his girlfriend, who had a daughter of his own. In fact, he had just gone house-hunting the day he was shot.
But the prize in his mind was becoming a cop, which several of his friends had recently done. “I’m becoming a future officer of the Philadelphia Police Department,” Khayyan’s best friend, Job Henri, told NBC10. “That’s one thing Khayyan wanted to do with himself. He wanted to protect and serve.”
When he wasn’t working, he often was the outgoing one who would organize events with his friends — a crew he knew mostly from his agricultural high school on Henry Avenue, which is where Khayyan developed his love of animals. They liked to call themselves Get To Poppin.’
On the list were usually paintball games, laser tag or ski outings, or trips to Dorney Park or Great Adventure.
He had a tendency to get into some mischief, but Marie says it was usually harmless. Like when a few years back, he goes out the back door in his underwear in the snow. “Or like when he and his buddy took my gas card and went to Virginia. That guy is cop now.”
His sense of humor was always present in his life, and he always like to stand out from the crowd, including when he did an ancestry tree when he was little.
“I’m of the Caucaisan persuasin, whatever you call it,” Marie said. “But my kids are interracial, and his father says, well you have to call your grammom to find out about the white side of your family. And he calls me up and says, grammom are you white? And after that he started calling himself “White Boy.” He put it on his backpack and everything, and it stuck.”
Marie says that one time, after she “joined Facebook to spy on my grandkids,” she was feeling low one day and sent all 26 them a message saying she felt taking advantage of. “I blast them, and tell them all you ever come over for is your wants and needs. And then they send me back messages saying, ‘No, you know we love you.’ And Khayyan comes back to me and says, ‘Hey, how about I take you out on a date? Maybe Olive Garden?’”
“And he says, ‘But after paintballing.”
“God, I miss the heck out of him,” Marie said, chuckling. ”He’d say, ‘Hey shorty, how you doin? And there’s nothing short about me.”
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