Mom asks someone to talk about son’s killing

Sometimes, alone in her South Linden house, she presses a piece of her son’s clothing to her nose and breathes in.

Ernestine Beatty-Anderson keeps Michael’s room as he left it. She looks through newspaper clippings of football games that were played nearly 20 years ago. Her son’s Whetstone jersey, the one his coach had kept with the expectation that he would go pro, is framed on a downstairs wall.

The house on East 22nd Avenue teems with memories.

As much as that hurts, Beatty-Anderson keeps it as it is.

“This is the last place my child was at,” she said. “It’s sad when a mother loses a son, and she’s smelling his hat and shoes, his clothes. It’s sad when that’s all you have left.”

Michael S. Beatty, 33, last left this house on July 29.

What happened next was encapsulated the next morning in a news release from the Columbus police homicide unit:

At this time there is no known motive and no known suspects.

The investigation continues.

This is the 54th Homicide in Columbus, Ohio in Calendar Year 2016.

After Beatty’s death, 52 more homicides would occur in the city in 2016. Of the year’s 106 killings, a little more than half have been solved.

Beatty’s death is not among them. What consumes Beatty-Anderson is that she knows it could be.

There were people with Beatty when he was killed. He knew the occupants of the home; after all, he’d cut through it to get to the backyard just before he died.

“They know who they

were, but they won’t say,” she said. “I hate to say it, but I know it’s one of his ‘friends’ that did this.”

Beatty was an outgoing student at Whetstone High School and a running back whose speed earned him an honorable-mention spot on the 2000 All-Central District Football Team. He graduated and attended Kent State and then Tiffin universities, where his mother said he decided he no longer wanted to play ball and came home.

He was a man by then, making his own decisions, and he found trouble on South Linden’s streets. He caught a felony drug charge in 2004 and another in 2010, the same year his son was born.

Beatty-Anderson, who ran a strict house, never

condoned his criminal behavior and doesn’t make excuses for it now.

“My son wasn’t innocent,” she said.

But there was another side to him, she said. That was the Michael Beatty mourned at a funeral that drew his former teachers, coaches and even some police officers who’d known him since a grade-school program and had never written him off.

“He was a lovable guy,” Beatty-Anderson said.

She’s heard the shooting was over money, that her son was owed a debt. She and her husband try to pass along information they come across to police, but both say the lead detective on the case is hard to reach. They know she’s busy but say she seems aloof when they finally get her on the phone.

“It’s like she’s taking (Beatty-Anderson) to be a nuisance,” Thomas Anderson said. “It just gets to be a little frustrating.”

They’re equally frustrated with those in the neighborhood who have information and won’t share it with police.

“It’s not just about my son; it’s all the young boys dying out here,” she said. “Their life still matters. It still matters.”

No one, Beatty-Anderson said, seems to want to talk about this. About her son.

So it is up to her. In the house on East 22nd Avenue, she talks for hours.