Killed Over Jordans

Some people just don’t get that it’s only shoes where people wear on their feet. When someone dies because of a pair of jordans, it’s just plain ridiculous.

“When 17-year-old Steve Terrett was found shot to death and shoeless in a South Side alley last week, his mother feared he was killed for his new $110 Nike Air Jordan shoes.”

+ Suntimes via 5th-Dimension

Police: Teen admits boy was killed for new Air Jordans

April 4, 2005

BY GARY WISBY STAFF REPORTER

When 17-year-old Steve Terrett was found shot to death and shoeless in a South Side alley last week, his mother feared he was killed for his new $110 Nike Air Jordan shoes.

Sunday it turned out she was right, Chicago Police said.

“It was all about the shoes,” police spokesman Pat Camden said in announcing the arrests of two teenagers for the crime.

Charged with murder and robbery were Eduain Foster, 19, of Minneapolis, and a 15-year-old boy from Calumet City who was not identified because he is a minor.

Foster gave police a statement confirming that Terrett was killed for his shoes. He accused his 15-year-old companion of pulling the trigger, Camden said.

The younger suspect, who was turned over to police by his father, made no statement on the advice of his attorney, Camden said.

Victim liked latest fashions

Details of the shooting are expected to emerge today when the suspects are arraigned in court.

Terrett was still alive when police found him at 10:30 p.m. March 28 in an alley in the 7200 block of South Perry, shot once in the lower back. He told officers before he collapsed that he had been “set up.” Terrett died later at Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn.

The teen’s mother, Barbara Braxton, said he was wearing his Jordan “Solidify” shoes — bought only a month earlier — when he left his house in the 7200 block of South Vernon at 9 p.m. to visit a girl.

Braxton said her son, a student at Robeson High School, wanted to be wearing the latest fashions.

“That’s what it’s all about,” said Braxton, a 38-year-old single mother of two who is a mail carrier for the U.S. Postal Service. “I bought him gym shoes.”

1st death linked to shoes

The white leather gym shoes have streaks of baby blue and a logo of Chicago Bulls legend Michael Jordan in his signature flight to the basket.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Jordan was leading the Bulls to six NBA championships, a TV commercial declaring “It’s gotta be the shoes” convinced many boys they had to have a pair. Across the country, many who couldn’t afford the shoes stole them from those who could.

Jordan shoes were a motive for many robberies in Chicago, but police could not recall anyone being killed for a pair before the Terrett youth was slain.