The grieving mother of a fatal stabbing victim says Paterson police ‘don’t care’

PATERSON — Yakima Chavers took several deep breaths as she began watching for the first time the video footage from the day in February when her 14-year-old son, Shaquan Capron, was fatally stabbed outside Eastside High School.

The recording showed students hanging around outside the school after dismissal while a marked Paterson police SUV with its emergency lights flashing sat parked along the curb, a precaution taken because officials were expecting trouble that afternoon.

The 30-year-old grieving mother began sobbing as turmoil replaced the calm after-school scene shown in the footage. Then, tears rolled down her cheek when an ambulance arrived on the video.

Finally, Chavers pulled the collar of her shirt over her eyes and left the room when the video showed emergency medical responders lift a gurney containing her son into the back of the ambulance.

Chavers and other family members say they are outraged by what the video showed — two police officers sent to prevent problems remained seated in their vehicle while the stabbing apparently occurred off-camera; the officers stayed inside the SUV for more than 10 seconds after her son fell to the ground from his wounds; and the officers did not tend to her son after they eventually got out of the police vehicle.

“They don’t care,” Chavers said of the officers’ conduct at the scene. “Anybody who grew up in Paterson knows the police don’t help us.”

'They failed him'

Authorities have not revealed the names of the officers involved, or whether they have been given any discipline because of the incident. The video, which Paterson Press obtained through a public records request, blurs the face of everyone shown in the footage.

The New Jersey Attorney General’s Office, which now controls Paterson’s police operations, has said the incident is under review.

Four days after the stabbing, police arrested a 15-year-old boy and charged him with Shaquan's murder.

Chavers said officials had refused to provide her with the street surveillance camera recording of the incident. Paterson Press showed its copy of the video to Chavers last week at her mother’s apartment in Paterson.

“They failed him,” said Nancy White, the deceased teenager’s grandmother. “They just sat in their car. How are you going to protect anybody like that? Somebody needs to be held accountable.”

Chavers and White said they only learned that Shaquan and the other boy had been involved in a fight the day before the fatal stabbing. Law enforcement sources said the previous fight was the whole reason the police SUV had been stationed outside the high school on the day of the stabbing.

“Why didn’t they tell the parents if they knew there was going to be trouble?” White asked.

Chavers said she learned her son had been stabbed when the boy’s father called her that afternoon. The father, she said, was at Eastside to pick up Shaquan to take him to a boxing gym where he had been training after school.

Shaquan was born when she was 15 and his father was 16, Chavers said. They didn’t remain a couple, she said.

“We were kids having a kid,” Chavers said.

“He’s still my best friend,” she added about Shaquan’s father.

Subscriber exclusive: Paterson added police presence outside HS, video shows. A teen was still fatally stabbed

'He was a great kid'

Shaquan was a student at Paterson’s School 8, the same one she had attended, until he was about 9 years old, said his mother.

Chavers said she decided to move her family away from Paterson after visiting her grandmother in North Carolina about five years ago.

“It was beautiful,” Chavers said of the Charlotte area. "A better place to raise kids.”

Chavers, who works as a car salesperson, found success down south and rented a two-story house on a cul-de-sac for herself and her three children, a place with a front lawn and a back yard.

But Chavers and her family had to come back to Paterson last December for what she described as personal reasons. It was supposed to be a temporary return, “for a year, tops,” Chavers said.

Shaquan didn’t want to come back to Paterson, his mother said. She read out loud a text he had sent her a few weeks before the move.

“Half my friends are either in jail, dead, or I don’t talk to them,” he wrote. “I don’t want to start over.”

But the teenager adapted once he returned to the city where he was born.

“He was a great kid,” said his grandmother. “He was so into boxing.”

White said her grandson stayed home so often she encouraged him to go outside more. She said he was very protective of his three younger siblings and entertained them.

“He made these goofy faces and they would just be laughing,” she recalled.

Joe Malinconico is editor of Paterson Press.

Email: editor@patersonpress.com

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Paterson NJ Eastside school stabbing victim's mom calls out police