‘A gentle giant’
Man killed in Queens car crash mourned
She wanted to spoil her only son with a car of his own, but her overprotective side kept talking her out of it.
She worried, like many mothers, that speed would get the best of Franklin Young Jr., and she’d get a phone call in the middle of the night.
Hall was in the passenger seat Sunday night. The call came anyway.
“I was scared to buy him a car,” Isabel Colon said Wednesday, through tears. “I could have. I wanted to buy him a car. But I wanted to avoid this.”
Cops said Young, 23, was killed when the speeding car he was in veered off the Belt Parkway in Queens and slammed into an overpass support on the edge of Baisley Pond Park near Kennedy Airport.
The 20-year-old driver survived, but was in critical condition at Jamaica Hospital, police said. His 2010 Nissan overturned and was left a twisted wreck.
Relatives filled Colon’s home in Brownsville, Brooklyn, trading stories about Young and all his interests: fashion, rapping, sports. He worked as a bouncer, and was studying to be a crossing guard.
But Colon didn’t talk with them. She saved her words for God.
“How do I live without my son?” Colon cried. “All the bad people, they get shot, they get chances to live. He’s a good kid, and you take him express? Everybody gets second chances. You didn’t give my son a second chance. Why, God?”
She didn’t get an answer. “I have my badge that they gave me from the hospital, ‘expiring, 23:07.’ ” Colon said. “That’s all I have. You took my bodyguard, my protector. He was a gentle giant. He had everything going for him. My son was a Curious George ... He loved adventure.”
He also loved food. At the top of his list were his mother’s homecooked meals.
“He was supposed to come home and eat that pie that was on the table from Thanksgiving,” Colon said. “‘What’s cooking, good looking?’ That’s what he would say to me. He loved my empanadas.”
When the burly Young wasn’t at home making food disappear, he was out with his girlfriend, Angelina Reyes, hitting restaurants and take-out spots.
Reyes, 22, recalled how they met in high school, trading glances in the lunchroom after Young transferred from another school.
“I loved his personality,” Reyes said. “He was charming, so soft, a gentle giant. He was truly different than anyone that I’ve been with. And no matter how hard things got with us, I knew he was the one. And that’s why I stuck around.
“We had plans. School, and trying to get an apartment, trying to have kids within the next year, and then the plans change. What do you do about that? He was his mom’s world. He was my world too, but he was also my future.”
Young’s former basketball coach, who lives in the same building, stopped by to offer his support and comfort. Winston Brannigan said Young’s first love was football, but had had good moves under the basket for a boy his size.
“I’ve coached so many kids,” Brannigan, 47, said. “And this one hurt so bad. He was so humble, so respectful. He was a special kid. Nobody could tell you anything bad about him.”
Young had also started a fashion line, and many of the friends and relatives who stopped by to see his mother wore sweatshirts sporting his brand.
In the apartment was a wooden frame with Young’s clothing logo on it. Colon explained that Young would dump paint into the frame and slide a squeegee across to print the logo onto his apparel.
Colon said she is going to hold on to all of Young’s clothing-making equipment to keep the brand going.
“He said ‘Mom, I’m not leaving you. I’ll always take care of you,’” she said. “I was living for him. He was my everything.”