Two stars far apart felled by teen gunmen
There’s a chilling case from long ago that parallels the death last weekend of 18-year-old basketball star Fedonta “JB” White.
It happened in November 1984, two days before Thanksgiving. Ben Wilson, 17, the most famous and most sought-after high school basketball player in America, was on a lunchtime walk with two girls.
Everyone in town knew of Benji, a kid who seemed larger than life.
Wilson had been a gawky, unskilled freshman, 12th man on a 12-player roster. Then he committed himself to basketball, demonstrating an uncommon work ethic. As Wilson’s skills improved, he went through an unusual growth spurt.
He stood 6 feet, 3 inches tall as a sophomore. Wilson grew to 6-7 as a junior, and he was almost 6-9 on the November day just before his senior season was to begin.
It was a heady time. Wilson’s high school was a defending state champion in basketball.
Some who followed the game were already comparing Wilson to Magic Johnson, then a top pro with the Los Angeles Lakers. Wilson, though skinny at 190 pounds, possessed Johnson’s artistry with a basketball.
On his walk, Wilson’s mood soured a block from his high school. One of the girls with him was the mother of his 10-week-old son. They argued.
Three boys were walking toward Wilson and the girls. Wilson bumped into one of them, a stranger named Billy Moore.
Parts of what happened next are in dispute. Uncontested is that 16-year-old Moore pulled a .22-caliber pistol and shot Wilson twice. Wilson died the next day.
The story of White’s short life is a lot like Wilson’s.
White was 6-8, a star player at Santa Fe High School. He finished requirements for his diploma early and would have been a scholarship player this fall at the University of New Mexico.
White was at a large party last weekend that stretched into the early morning hours Saturday. Santa Fe County sheriff ’s deputies say White had “a physical altercation” with Estevan Montoya.
Montoya, 16, is charged with shooting and murdering White.
The only significant differences in the cases of White and Wilson center on geography and demographics.
Wilson attended Simeon High School in Chicago, a city that averaged more than 700 murders a year in the mid-1980s.
Murders of teenagers or small children didn’t necessarily make the papers in Chicago. Violence and death were so common that most homicides couldn’t be covered.
Wilson in 1984 was one of 117 homicide victims in Chicago between the ages of 16 and 20.
But Wilson’s death still stunned Chicago. He was a celebrity, the best-known kid in a metropolis.
Beyond that, Simeon was a high school of middle-class kids. Gangs hadn’t infiltrated the school, and the plague of crack cocaine had not yet exploded.
Wilson’s neighborhood bordered on rougher areas, but street violence was unusual so near Simeon High School.
The common threads of the two cases extend beyond the victims to the defendants.
A 16-year-old carrying a handgun is trouble in any city.
More laws aren’t the answer. Plenty are on the books already. Montoya faces a series of criminal charges, and he might be prosecuted as an adult.
Better parenting is seldom a prevailing topic in these cases of gun violence. It should be.
Laws mean little in Santa Fe, Chicago or anywhere else if no one at home knows or cares a 16-year-old packs a pistol, or that the boy is at a party at 3:30 a.m. while a pandemic rages.
Aside from similarities in the way Wilson and White died, there’s another reason I thought of the prodigy from Chicago.
Coaches with deep ties to New Mexico had the inside track on recruiting Wilson, getting him out of Chicago and onto a bucolic college campus.
The late Lou Henson was the coach at the University of Illinois when Wilson was in high school. Henson came to Illinois from New Mexico State University, where he’d led the Aggies to six NCAA Tournament appearances and the Final Four in 1970.
One of Henson’s fine players at NMSU was Jimmy Collins. Collins became Henson’s assistant and chief recruiter at Illinois.
Collins had hit it off with Wilson while trying to sell him on the University of Illinois. Years after Wilson’s murder, Collins still kept a giant photo of Wilson in his office.
By some accounts, 10,000 people attended Wilson’s funeral. He was buried in his high school basketball uniform.
He has since been the subject of documentaries. They focused as much on the crime that killed him as his wizardry on the basketball court.
All of them raise the question of what might have been.
It will be same way with JB White, a shooting star with a story as sad as Wilson’s.