Ghetto bullet kills young father who inspired America

David Charter:

A TEENAGER who was profiled in a magazine for being an “outstanding single father” has been shot dead in front of his home.

Terrell Pough, 18, got up each day at 6.20am, took Diamond, his two-year-old daughter, to daycare, went to school, then worked a six-hour shift as a restaurant manager before returning to his home in Philadelphia at midnight.

But the national attention that he received for his lifestyle may have contributed to his brutal murder in the tough neighbourhood from which he was desperate to escape.

Police investigating his shooting are still looking for a car that a well-wisher gave Mr Pough after reading in People magazine that he had to make a four-hour bus journey to take his daughter to her babysitter.

Damien Webber, of the Males Achieving Responsibility Successfully programme for teenage fathers, and Mr Pough’s mentor, said: “He was a true spark in everyone’s life. He was very humble and modest. His whole thing was about Diamond and trying to create a better life for them.”

Mr Pough was 15 when his former girlfriend, Charmaine Houston, also 15, gave birth, and he changed from what People magazine called “a street-tough kid” who often got into fights into a hard-working student and devoted father.

Mr Pough told People magazine that holding his daughter for the first time was a turning point in his life. “I felt this warm rush of love,” he said. “I knew it was time for me to do what I got to do.”

He left Germantown High School to learn carpentry. The MARS programme taught him parenting skills and he won full custody of his daughter after expressing concerns about the way his former girlfriend was bringing her up.

After the custody case, Ms Houston, who had access to Diamond at the weekends, said: “She loves her Dad. If it came between me and him, he’d win.” But Mr Webber said that Mr Pough had become embarrassed by the level of attention he had received for his efforts. “I know how he felt,” Mr Webber said. “It was written all over his face: ‘All this for me just doing what I’m supposed to do?’”

Mr Pough had finished his shift at the New Orleans Chicken restaurant and was on his way to pick up his daughter when he was killed. The Philadelphia Daily News wrote that his “sole purpose of being a responsible, respectable father could not save him from Philadelphia’s vicious epidemic of senseless murders spreading rampantly in black communities”.

He was the fifth high school student to have been shot dead in two weeks, and the 337th murder in the city this year. Police said that he had been shot in the back of the head in front of his home late on Thursday night. He died 40 minutes later in hospital.

In August he had spoken of his hopes for his daughter, telling People magazine: “If something ever happens to me, no one can ever tell her that her Dad didn’t take care of her.”

Yesterday Richard Pough, his uncle, said: “Kids have no respect for life these days. They have been programmed. Its all about guns and violence.”

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