(CHICAGO) Her daddy’s heart, she’s plastered in photos on his social media pages, a 3-year-old who preens in boxing gloves and robe in one picture, her expressive eyes and pout the spitting image of her father, Ed “Bad Boy” Brown.
“The love of my life,” the promising welterweight, whose murder in a drive-by shooting on Saturday rocked the boxing community, calls his daughter Kayla in one post.
Kayla was a key reason why Brown, 25, an undefeated, national junior welterweight boxer with 16 knockouts in his 20-0 record — and clearly headed to the big time — refused entreaties to leave Chicago, his managers told the Chicago Sun-Times on Monday.
“The boxing community . . . is just shocked. World champions from all over the world are sending their condolences,” said Mike Cericola, who has managed him since he was a kid in the Chicago Park District.
The nationally known boxer is the latest statistic in the violence that has engulfed Chicago’s neighborhoods, with the city surpassing 700 homicides for the first time in two decades.
A vigil is planned for 6 p.m. Tuesday at the Garfield Park gym, where he trained. Organizers plan to march from there to the 3200 block of West Warren Boulevard, where he was killed.
“When I first saw him in the ring, he was just a little scrawny thing, but you could see his talent, and that he worked hard,” Cericola said. “They fight as amateurs as little kids, and the older they get, they start looking at training professionally. Everybody wants to be the next Floyd Mayweather, but this actually was.”
Brown was sitting in a car on Saturday with a 19-year-old woman who picked him up from the gym after a late-night workout. They had just dropped off a third passenger, family members said.
That’s when a silver vehicle pulled up and bullets flew, striking Brown in the head and the woman in the leg, police said.
“They were actually dropping off somebody else, and went and turned up one block, and she was about to back up and keep going, when a car just seen them and started firing,” Tamika Rainey, Brown’s aunt, said Monday, as she and other family worked on funeral arrangements.
“We just have no clue about what this was. That’s the scary part about it,” she said. “His 3-year-old … And his girlfriend’s not doing so good. This is hard for all of us. We’re just trying to get together now and see how we can put him away really nicely.”
Toward that end, the family has set up a GoFundMe page seeking help with funeral expenses.
In addition, community activist Andrew Holmes said $1,000 had been raised by Monday toward a reward fund for information that helps find Brown’s killer. He thinks the reward will grow.
Brown’s father is “devastated,” Rainey said.
Brown lost his mother when he was 11. Debra Gill, 29, was among 21 victims killed in the 2003 E2 Chicago nightclub stampede. She left behind five children. His father, Ed Brown Sr., had gone to prison about that same time, so Brown was raised by his grandmother, Wendy Gill.
When Brown, of East Garfield Park, joined the park district boxing league, he found his passion and his pathway. The 6-feet, 140-pound contender boxed his way up through the amateurs and tournaments circuit until he became a national champion. He made the 2012 Olympics tryouts but didn’t make the team. By then, everyone knew he had mad skills.
“Ed Brown was one of the top 10 amateur fighters in the nation. He turned pro in 2012, and he was highly respected. Nobody else had his 20-0 record,” said Nate Jones, a former Olympic and professional boxer, and a close friend and assistant trainer to the legendary Mayweather.
“Ed and I were supposed to meet at Taylor Park at 1 p.m. Saturday. I got the call from Mike at 3 a.m. that morning. It broke my heart,” said Jones, who had just joined Brown’s team of Cericola, veteran Las Vegas fight manager Cameron Dunkin and Chicago trainer George Hernandez.
“He was three fights away from fighting for the world championship. Three fights away,” Jones said.
Unfortunately, Brown’s environment in the hard-knock West Side neighborhood had ensnared him. He had in the past run afoul of the law with the company he kept, and when Cericola brought him to sign with Dunkin last year, he had just gotten out of jail after being shot a second time.
When Dunkin implored him to leave Chicago, Brown said he’d wait, citing his daughter and girlfriend. Cericola described him as a quiet young man whose reserved personality belied the angry powerhouse he became when the bell rang in the ring.
He wanted to make it so he could help his family.
“I just dropped his father off. Words cannot express or even explain how you feel at the loss of a loved one, and especially someone like this young man,” Rainey said.
“He was a good guy. He wanted to stay in the neighborhood where he was born and raised. He loved his daughter, and was very close to his family,” she said. “Everybody loved him. I can’t express our sorrow. He touched so many hearts, and meant so much to young and old in this community, to people outside of it. And he was taken for no reason, for no reason.”
