Family members say a 23-year-old man fatally shot in Chicago was a former college football player working as a teacher in the city.
Xavier Joy was walking from his car to his home after visiting his girlfriend Thursday night when he was shot and killed, his mother told NBC 5.
“The world has lost this light,” Nykea Pippion-McGriff said. “Someone who loved life and was giving back.”
Police said officers responding to a call of a person shot just after 10 p.m. in the 6200 block of South Ingleside Thursday found Joy with multiple gunshot wounds in the parking lot of his apartment complex. He was pronounced dead at the scene, just steps from a painting that read "stop the killing."
“He had just gone out to see his girlfriend and he was coming back. He was literally getting out of his car to walk home not even two blocks,” Pippion-McGriff said.
The shooting took place just blocks from University of Chicago on the city’s South Side.
Joy, according to family, had recently attended Morehouse College, where he played football as a freshman in 2012. The university’s football roster cites him as saying his chief ambition was “to give back my community, and provide for my family.”
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Joy was working as a teacher in Chicago in “some of the worst schools that we have,” his mother said.
“I can’t even explain the loss,” Pippion-McGriff said, “to my family and to the community.”
Joy was one of 14 people shot Thursday in the city. As of Friday afternoon, no one was in custody for his death.
“I’m one of many mothers experiencing loss like this,” Pippion-McGriff said. “It has got to stop and we are going to be the ones to get involved and do it.”
