A life remade, then lost
From gang member to anti-violence worker to statistic, Elijah Cancer’s story offers lessons, hard truths about the plague of urban violence
It’s 3 a.m. in the South End.
Yelling catches Elijah Cancer’s attention.
The subject of the argument and how many people are involved will remain unclear well beyond July 7. But it will result in another eruption of violence in the middle of one of Albany’s deadliest years.
Elijah had heard there could be some type of conf lict at a party that night. He doesn’t stray away from the commotion. He jumps in.
He’s used to mediating fights. Over the past year, it’s become his passion. Because violence consumed a major part of his life, Elijah understands how conflicts flare up and what’s needed to douse them.
But this time Elijah can’t stop the bloodshed.
Gunshots echo on the dim street. People scatter.
A 16-year-old is struck in the forearm. He’ll survive.
But as Elijah’s body hits the ground, blood from two wounds — one on the right side of his chest, the other in his left lower back — begins to pool on a sidewalk littered with cigarette butts and plastic wrappers from the nearby corner store.
It’s a sidewalk he’s walked many times before.
It’s near his residence. It’s just a quarter-mile from his youngest son’s elementary school, where he drops the boy off each day. And it’s just two blocks from where Elijah was shot 14 years
before.
It’s where he grew up. Where he sold weed and cocaine with fellow gang members. Where he was arrested, and where he returned after prison.
And it’s where he speaks with young people, urging them not to make the same mistakes that he did.
He tried to escape the violence — end it, even. But in the middle of a particularly cruel summer, a man dedicated to stopping violence becomes its victim.
Elijah is pronounced dead at Albany Medical Center less than an hour later. He’s ninth on a list that will eventually grow to include 15 homicide victims, the city’s highest number in nearly two decades.
In the days following his death, dozens of old videos of him resurface. “My name is Elijah Cancer, but a lot of people know me as Sleez,” Elijah said in a 2016 interview recorded at his church. “... I feel like I got a story to tell, and that I can help change somebody’s life.”
Street survival
Elijah was born on June 24, 1986, and raised in the South End. Just blocks from the center of state government, it’s a neighborhood that struggles with all the ills brought on by poverty.
It’s the sort of place where survival can depend on loyalties and connections. And when Elijah was a teenager, it was turf controlled by the Original Gangsta Killas.
For Elijah and other young men, membership in the gang was a way to earn respect from others and find a family in the streets. It was also a way to protect himself.
“I thought there was no other route,” he said.
He was only a few weeks past his 18th birthday when he was shot in the leg, forearm, chest and stomach at the corner of Clinton and Alexander streets, just around the corner from his home. It happened near dawn on Aug. 7, 2004.
“My mom was the first person to come out and see me laying in the street,” Elijah said.
No one has ever been arrested for the shooting.
Elijah had seen it turn out much worse. He carried the names of 13 friends on a shirt he often wore. The list included Shakira Chambers, who died on a sidewalk at 17 in 2001 when she was shot by two men on Elizabeth Street; Javvon Morton, shot and killed in 2002 in the middle of an argument on Robin Street; Shahied Oliver, just 15 when he was gunned down during a birthday party in Arbor Hill; and Richard Gibbs, murdered in 2011 while on his way to meet friends for a latenight snack in the South End.
But Elijah wouldn’t join that list of names this time.
Swept up
Five years later, Elijah’s life seemed split in two: He was nine credits and an internship away from earning his bachelor’s degree in child and family studies from SUNY Oneonta. But “I was still coming home on the weekends.”
“I was at the point in my life where I was on the fence of whether I was going to go this way or that way,” he said in an interview.
In October 2009, Elijah — who had been living on the Oneonta campus — and two dozen other members of OGK were arrested in a massive drug investigation that led to federal racketeering charges. He pleaded guilty to racketeering and was sentenced to eight years in prison.
“The movies make prison look easy,” Elijah said to a classroom of teens during a Facebook Live session. “The movies aren’t going into the 4-by-4 cell, which is called a box. They aren’t showing you the mental frustrations and pain you are going through.”
Elijah expressed his frustrations — about confinement, not seeing his family, being moved from prison to prison after fights, and the life that he had been leading — with his friend Leslie Phelan, the director of the South End Community Outreach Center.
The two exchanged letters for nearly eight years.
“He wrote a lot about his anger,” Phelan said. “He was angry at himself and he was angry at society.”
“Im very aware of all my codefendants that have been blessed to make it out of this hell on Earth, and in the timely fashion that they have done,” Elijah wrote in a letter dated March 22, 2015. “Im happy for them, but sad for myself for I still have 21 months to do B4 I can come home. I always seem to get the short end of the stick.”
The letters came to Phelan from New York, Pennsylvania, Florida and Arizona — the different prisons Elijah had been transferred to.
They discussed various topics — the fights Elijah got in, the courses he was taking, church, loved ones from home, his children’s holiday plans and the future.
But no matter the topic, there was one common theme in each letter, Phelan said — hope.
“He told me he didn’t want to live this way anymore,” Phelan recalled. “He said he was ready to change his life.”
“I’m confident that God has a plan,” Elijah wrote in a letter dated Oct. 5, 2015. “Just bc I cant see his way, doesnt mean he doesnt have a way.”
In 2016, Elijah received the news that he was being released early.
“I was ecstatic. I was just .... ” Elijah paused, speechless. “I was different. It was a long time coming.”
A different life
On Nov. 17, 2016, the doors of Cape Vincent Correctional Facility north of Watertown opened. Elijah was free.
He looked for a job, but a felony and seven years in prison limited his options.
“I just want people to look at me and not see the bad, but look at the good instead,” Elijah told his pastor, the Rev. Paul Damone Johnson of Arbor Hill’s Metropolitan New Testament Mission Baptist Church.
Johnson looked Elijah in the eyes. “God has plans for you,” he said. “God not only sees your past but he sees your future.”
Elijah pushed forward — he attended church every Sunday, got a job at the Port of Albany, and did volunteer work for Phelan. He dedicated the remaining time in the day to being a good father.
He was constantly at his children’s schools visiting and volunteering. His commitment did not go unnoticed, and he was given the Parents Are Partners Award at the 2018 sixth-grade moving up ceremony at Albany Community Charter School, which his son attends.
He also began to coach Pop Warner football and Little League. The kids instantly gravitated towards his humor, confidence and inspirational story. The coaches and kids felt like Coach Cancer was helping them — but they were saving him.
“Coaching and being a father is what I do to keep myself from going back to temptations,” Elijah said. “So I don’t go back to that other life.”
‘On my block’
Elijah eventually came to Jerome Brown, the director of the Albany 518 SNUG program, to interview for an outreach worker position. SNUG employs the formerly incarcerated as mentors for teens who could fall victim to crime or violence.
Elijah found his calling.
“They were looking for what they call ‘credible messengers,’” Elijah said in an interview on “Labor Talk,” a program aired on WOOC 105.3 FM, a community radio station affiliated with the Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy. “It’s the only job where you can get hired for having a felony.”
Brown said Elijah, who started working for the organization in October 2017, was exceptionally good at mediating fights. People knew him, where he came from and how he had turned his life around. They respected him for that. “He saved lives,” Brown said. Elijah especially enjoyed the job because it was in his neighborhood. “I’m right on my block doing work, talking to the youth that I see every day,” he said.
Elijah was using his worst memories and lowest lows in life for good — to help fix a problem that he had once been a part of.
His caseload involved about 10 teens and young adults. He would help them study, enroll in school, connect them with employers, find health insurance or an apartment, or simply be there when they needed it.
“I want to prevent them from going through what I went through as a young guy in the ‘hood,” Elijah said. “If we can get them out of the streets for eight hours of the day, then it’s a win for us.
In June 2018, Elijah won SNUG worker of the year.
Later that month, Elijah stood among a chanting crowd at Swinburne Park for the annual Stop the Violence march and community rally.
“This is what happens when there is a shooting in the community or some sort of act of violence or murder: We gather around and we rally,” Elijah said in an interview conducted at the June 30 rally.
At the midpoint of the year, the city had already seen seven homicides.
Just days later, the Fourth of July weekend would prove to be even more violent, with six people shot and the fatal stabbing of 29-year-old Rashaun Byrd.
Elijah and Byrd had known each other. “The summer here, people just start going crazy,” Elijah said.
He had seven days left. The next anti-violence march would be in response to his own killing.
The toll
Elijah’s family and friends had received news like this before.
He had been shot. But this time he didn’t make it.
“He was killed doing what he dedicated himself to: stopping the violence that has claimed too many lives,” SNUG’S Brown said at a news conference after Elijah’s death.
Elijah left behind three children, who by the end of 2018 would join more than a dozen others who lost a parent to violence this year in Albany.
“You rendered my grandchildren fatherless, and for that my son would want me to seek justice,” Desiree Ford, Elijah’s mother, wrote to her son’s unknown murderer.
“Those children were his heart and soul, and they will never get to witness what an amazing man their Daddy was. They will never get to feel his touch or hear his sweet voice ever again. You robbed my son of doing the one thing that he wanted more than anything in his life, and that was being a father.”
Seven days after Elijah’s death and just a few hours before he was buried, 31-year-old Khalil Barnes was shot and killed while sitting in his car at the West Hill intersection. It was the same corner where Anthony Malloy had been killed on Jan. 4.
Barnes and Elijah had traveled parallel paths: Barnes was arrested in 2009 during a gang sweep, pleaded guilty to racketeering, served six and a half years in prison and had seemingly begun to turn his life around after before getting out.
People familiar with his murder suspect it was in retaliation for Elijah’s death: Barnes had been a member of the Arbor Hill and West Hill-based Jungle Junkies, rivals of OGK before the arrests that largely ended both gangs’ dominance.
But Elijah’s family and friends decried the violence. So did Barnes’ parents, Marcus Barnes and Fatima Rucker.
“My son didn’t deserve to die,” Fatima Rucker later told a crowd a community gathering. “Elijah didn’t deserve to die.”
“He was killed doing what he dedicated himself to: stopping the violence that has claimed too many lives.”
— Jerome Brown, the director of Albany SNUG 518 said at a news conference after Elijah’s death.
Mourning, football
After Elijah’s death, his children found support in the community, at school and on sports teams.
“I miss him so much, but I know how much he loved being with all you guys,” Elijah’s mother told a crowd of football players, cheerleaders and parents at the Albany Pop Warner banquet on
Dec. 8. “Thank you for keeping his memory alive — it helps getting through the pain.”
Elijah’s death wasn’t the only violence to shatter the football program in 2018.
Joseph Davis, the 42-year-old coach of the Albany Pee Wee team, was fatally shot on Sept. 29 outside Club Phoenix on Central Avenue.
He was adored by the team, who called him Coach Seven. Like Elijah, Davis had a son on the team. Like Elijah, he died while trying to break up a fight.
“We have two angels up in the sky now, watching this team and protecting us,” Coach Damien Waring said. “I want you to know that Coach Seven loved you; I want you to know Coach Cancer loved you.”
By the end of 2018 there would be a total of 15 homicides, including 11 shootings and three stabbings. Most of the victims were black men in their 20s.
The last time there were 15 homicides in Albany was 2000; the record for homicides in the city is 16 in 1987.
During Elijah’s 32 years, 256 people died by homicide in Albany.
The change
Elijah Cancer’s story has been told outside the South End. It’s gone beyond Albany and the Capital Region.
There have been awards, donations and events to honor him. Albany 518 SNUG traveled to New York City to accept a Community Hero Award from the health care company Wellcare in his honor, and Gov. Andrew Cuomo pledged a $50,000 inaugural gun-violence grant named the Elijah Cancer Memorial Gun Violence Outreach Grant. More people have volunteered their time at SNUG since his passing.
“He was the change,” said Shawn Cooks, who worked with Elijah. “He showed that if he can do it, anyone can. Anyone can change.”
When the people who knew Elijah need a small reminder of their friend, sibling, son or father, they visit his Facebook page, where he had taken up the habit of posting a daily quote for inspiration.
Two days before he died, Elijah picked this one: “Sometimes you’ll never know the value of a moment or person until they become a memory.”