‘MURDERED MY BABY OVER A DICE GAME’

TAYQUAN WILKERSON still lights candles in the lobby of the Brooklyn housing project where he and his brother grew up to let his slain sibling know that he’s still listening.

A sanitation worker plowing the streets in East Flatbush found the body of 19-year-old Trevon Dickens (inset), 19, in a snowbank last March 15. He had been shot several times.

“I light a candle every time I get a memory, every time I have a dream of him,” Tayquan, 17, said outside his apartment in the Cypress Hills Houses in East New York. “I light a candle just to let him know that I understand. That I hear him.”

The younger brother is having trouble coming to grips with the murder.

“Even though I know he’s gone and I saw him in a casket, it still don't get through my head,” Tayquan said.

Dickens, who police said was a member of the Cypress Backside Crew and killed in a gang-related shooting, never got the support he needed to succeed, his brother said. “If you look outside this door, this is what made him who he is,” Tayquan said. “It’s the streets.”

Dickens wanted to make money rapping to help his family move out of the project. He wanted to finish high school and go to college. Above all, he wanted to survive.

“When people asked him what he wanted to be when he got older, he always said ‘21,’” Wilkerson told the Daily News. “Out here, a lot of people don’t get to turn 21. You gotta cherish every year you have.”

Dickens and his brother once talked about what to do if one of them died.

“He would tell me, ‘You gotta strive for better, cause if you go and do something dumb, now mommy doesn’t have two kids,’ ” Tayquan recalled.

He has taken his brother’s message to heart.

“We’re in the gutter right now,” he said. “The only way to get out of this is to put your mind on the right path and go down a different route.” Adam Shrier

a lot of people out here don’t get to 21