Slain teen able to avoid gangs, until Monday
If Ed Cooper loved playing video games in his bedroom even more than the typical 15-year-old boy, his mother let it slide. Those games, and his beloved pet cat, kept him out of reach of the gangs in Lawndale.
“He would stay in the house and watch TV and eat cereal all day,” she said.
But even Cooper, an A and B student at Orr Academy High School who police confirmed had no gang ties, liked to get outside every once in a while to play real basketball with his friends.
That was the plan Monday evening, when he was murdered.
Cooper’s father dropped him off at Lawndale and Ohio a little after 5 p.m. He didn’t notice the black van that rolled up nearby at about the same time, and he didn’t think anything was amiss until he heard five gunshots as he was pulling away.
He turned around and saw his son lying on the ground in a vacant lot across the street.
“He was running and they shot him,” Jerome Wordlaw said.
A police source said a black van pulled up near the park where Cooper and his friends were standing. A gunman walked up to them and started shooting as the boys ran away. Cooper was shot in the street and continued running, falling in the middle of a vacant lot.
The source said the shooting appears to have been part of a dispute between rival gangs, though it is not known precisely why the group Cooper was standing with was targeted.
Charlotte Wordlaw, Cooper’s mother, was also in the neighborhood at the time, and heard the shots. She thought they were fireworks, but a boy ran up behind her and told her, “Ed’s been shot.”
“I get there and pull up the one-way street, my baby laying there in their arms in a vacant lot on Lawndale and Ohio,” she said.
Cooper was entering his junior year and was starting to think about options for college. His mother said he hoped to study criminal justice and to become a police officer.
Cooper would have turned 16 on July 22. He asked for an outfit from a popular clothing line, which his mother said she got for him.
“My baby wanted a True Religion outfit. Now I have to bury my baby in his True Religion outfit.”