Guest essay: A thug’s mother repents

[Editor’s note: This column is remarkably brave, because it is contrary to Inquirer columnist Helen Ubinas’ usual narrative — that “we” are all to blame for every one of society’s ills. I also salute one mother’s courage in accepting her own responsibility as a bad role model, something far too few people are willing to do.]

By Helen Ubinas

Andrea Robinson is brutally honest about the person responsible for helping lead her son to the streets that eventually cost him his life: her.

Andrea Robinson takes responsibility for why her son went bad. (Photo: Philadelphia Inquirer)

When Robinson’s son, Jermaine, was gunned down in April 2021 at age 29, it was the bleak culmination of a life lived on the edge.

He got kicked out of school for assaulting a teacher. He stole his grandmother’s gun. He lied incessantly — moments all, Robinson recognizes now, that essentially followed in her footsteps.

“I planted all the seeds,” she said.

I’ve shared many stories of victims of gun violence, but none of them has been quite like that of Robinson, a 47-year-old transportation driver, who not only acknowledges her position as a negative role model but has now made it her personal mission to make sure others do not become the same thing.

Robinson, a mother of five, loved her son, Jermaine. She’s mourned her firstborn every day since he was shot multiple times on the 3500 block of Emerald Street two springs ago.

But to deny her part in the path he took, she said, would be to perpetuate the kind of lie that too many people tell themselves.

By the time I met Robinson at the United Church of the First Born near 25th Street and Lehigh Avenue in North Philadelphia one recent Saturday afternoon, I knew not to look for her son’s image among the dozen or so photographs of shooting victims that were on display inside.

The church, where a quarter of the parishioners have lost a loved one to gun violence — including the lead pastor, whose son was killed in November — was hosting a roundtable discussion on the city’s gun violence crisis.

Robinson was one of the panelists, but it was a viral video of Robinson speaking at another anti-violence event a month earlier that sent me in search of her.

That day, Robinson did not speak of what she lost, but of what her son may have taken from others — maybe even from some of those in that very crowd who were hanging on her every word — before he was killed.

“I refuse to post my son,” she said, referring to putting his image on social media sites or other forums. “I refuse to put up a poster, a picture, or wear a shirt with his face on it. My son was a trap boy” — a drug dealer — “and I used to go to the drug blocks” and chase him away.

“I gave birth to him,” she said. “But the streets raised him.”

To display his photo as even an honorary gesture, she told me at the church, would not just be dishonest but potentially dangerous. After all, there are some in the neighborhood who still might nurse a grudge with Robinson’s family despite Jermaine’s death.

His friends insist her son’s nickname — “Shooter” — referred to his rapping talents. But Robinson said she knows better, just as she knows that she must answer for her part in her son’s choices.

Robinson grew up with her mom and older sister in North Philadelphia. She regularly attended school and church. But when she got pregnant with Jermaine at 15, she fell away from both and into a life in the streets with the father of her two oldest children.

She drove around in “johnnies” — stolen cars. She wore clothes and jewelry that had been shoplifted. All the while, she told her children, “Do as I say, not as I do.” Her life was a messy tangle of contradictions.

“My kids seen all of that,” she said.

And, at the end of the day, the lessons that stuck most with Jermaine involved what he saw, not what she said.

By the time Robinson started turning her life around and tried to pull her son back with her, he was spiraling away from her on a downward trajectory that could not be reversed.

After the age of 11, the longest Jermaine stayed out of the criminal justice system was the two years before his death. But he never served much time for drug and gun charges. 

After Jermaine could no longer convince his mother to believe his lies, he exploited a legal system that Robinson said often just “slapped him on the wrist.”

As we spoke, I couldn’t help but wonder what some might take away from her story.

Whenever I write about gun violence, there are always those who insist on putting the blame on victims or the victims’ families. They trot out the myth of Black-on-Black criminality, despite white people committing crimes against other white people at about the same rate that Black people do against other Black people. The reality is that the vast majority of most crimes are committed by a person of the same race as the victim.

I shared my concerns with Robinson, who recently self-published Mothers of Trapboys: This is Our Story, and asked her if she ever worried that some might use her story to lean on all those tired stereotypes about African Americans and crime.

Hers is an uncomfortable story, she acknowledged, an uncomfortable truth. But in order to hold herself accountable, Robinson said she could no more fear the judgments of others than she could control those who choose to use her story to fit their own preconceived notions of Black Americans.

At a time when so many people in our city — the police, prosecutors, far too many politicians — are running away from taking any responsibility for their role in Philadelphia’s gun crisis, Robinson has leaned into hers.

She planted the seeds, and her heart broke as she watched them be sown.

That sense of personal accountability, more than anything else, may be the most important takeaway from Robinson’s journey. It may also be the missing element in the often incomplete stories we keep telling ourselves, and each other, about our shared responsibility for what’s killing our city.