17-year-old killed in Pittsburgh is more than just homicide for those he mentored

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PITTSBURGH — The nonprofit Youth Enrichment Services had commissioned its teenage employee Mathew Steffy-Ross to create “a wall of remembrance” for young homicide victims.

Pittsburgh had seen a spike in homicides in recent years. In 2021, 29 of the 123 victims were 20 years old or younger.

YES, which offers mentorship programs and works with local courts on alternatives to standard juvenile justice, has struggled to give its participants a way “to talk about what’s going on around them to their friends “said Anay Pope, the program director.

Matt was a former mentee who became a part-time employee. Lanky, he wore his hair in long braids, two of which fell to the sides of his face.

Matt researched reports online of people under the age of 18 in the area who had been murdered recently. He printed their names, ages, and neighborhoods in cursive font and cut them out. He piled them under a banner reading “The Lost.”

Now his name is waiting to be added to the wall.

Pope couldn’t bring himself to pin him down. This thought makes her burst into tears.

“When his name appears there, he will continue to be my real reason,” she said. “It will just be a reminder, every day, why I started working with young people.”

Matt and Jaiden Brown, also 17, were both killed in a mass shooting at a crowded Airbnb party in Pittsburgh in mid-April. A hundred bullets were fired, hitting 10 people. The police have still not made any arrests.

Nationally, the rate of shots that kill or injure at least four people is higher this year than it was before the pandemic, according to the Gun Violence Archivesa research group.

In 2020, the firearm homicide rate was higher than in any year since 1994, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported last week. The biggest increase that year was seen among young people, blacks and men.

For those who knew him, Matt isn’t just another statistic.

He was a creative soul who had reinvented himself in the few years since the death of the grandmother who raised him had derailed his life at the age of 14. He had a sly sense of humor and a sense of selflessness towards other troubled kids. He had notebooks filled with poetry and sketches.

His main focus was graphic design and with the help of one of a series of mentors he created a t-shirt design which they were about to produce. It incorporated his personal motto: “Stay in the fight”.

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As children, Matt and his older brother lived with their grandmother, Mary Ross-Coleman, in the Pittsburgh suburb of Penn Hills. His great-aunt, Bonnie McLain, remembers him as a happy kid who signed up for the Boy Scouts and spent the summer days playing baseball, dropping by her house to raid the fridge to Gatorade.

In August 2018, the same month Matt turned 14, his grandmother, who had been his primary caretaker – the woman he called “Mom” – died. He and his brother moved in with their father. The shock of the loss was so deep that Matt cried at its mention, McLain said. The family avoided raising him when he was around.

He also struggled after entering high school, suddenly uprooted to a new neighborhood. Nate Crawford, one of the intervention specialists at YES, recalls that “he wasn’t on par with some of the kids academically, … and he was bullied a lot for that”.

During this difficult time, Matt and a friend put an Xbox up for sale on Craigslist. When the buyer came to pick it up, he took the money back and left him just the box the video game system came in. He was arrested, although these records are not available because he was a minor.

A judge assigned Matt to a YES-run diversion program in 2018, his great-aunt said.

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Matt joined non-profit men’s group Boys to Men. Each week, he had a one-on-one meeting with an intervention specialist and an outing in which staff members took all mentees to a casual location such as a movie theater or arcade. The boys talked about life skills that aren’t part of the school curriculum: caring for the family, setting goals, gaining financial knowledge.

Mentors who remember Matt recall a similar pattern: when they first met him he was shy, but once they established a relationship he was bright, talkative and funny.

Pope, YES’s program director, remembers he had a sly way of communicating. She nagged him, like a mentor would, to focus on a task or absorb a point — and he cocked his head to the side as if in thought. Then he smiled and said, “I understand, Miss Anay. She burst out laughing. This immediately defused the tension.

School remained a struggle, in part because of her anxiety over formal learning, her great-aunt said. In 2018, he transferred to a charter high school, Propel Braddock Hills, which had a mall campus next to a Family Dollar and a program for children who had been through the justice system.

At the start of the coronavirus pandemic, he tried online learning but soon joined the legion of kids who essentially disconnected from school. He spent his days working behind the wheel in fast food restaurants.

In the six months before his death, Matt attended another alternative school, returned to Propel, and eventually transferred to the Phase 4 Learning Center, a private school program designed for credit restoration, hoping to to graduate at 18.

He was severely behind academically, said Terrie Suica-Reed, founder and CEO of Phase 4, but he had gathered an array of new interests: rap, poetry, graphic design.

“He recorded a few songs in our studio,” Suica-Reed said. “His poetry was deep, with positive messages.”

Her songs were “mostly rap music with melody,” she recalls. “It was about what life was like as a teenager, how to get by as best he could. He talked about racial justice and gun violence.

To his family, he was shy about his creative pursuits. McLain asked to hear the songs he recorded at Phase 4. He declined. “He said, ‘Auntie, that’s a big deal,'” McLain said. “I said, ‘That’s something.'”

His new professional ambition was designing t-shirts. Matt kept a sketchbook of shapes, symbols, logos, words and phrases. He drew several variations of the word peace, Suica-Reed said.

At a school-run violence prevention seminar, he met Lee Davis, a Pittsburgh-area jack-of-all-trades who has worked in marketing, entertainment production, and business consulting and in leadership. This background made him a popular lecturer in schools. It has provided insight to many students seeking non-traditional careers.

Matt showed her a drawing. Davis was blunt: it didn’t look professional. But if Matt worked to come up with something sleeker, with more symmetry and impact, Davis would fund a line of shirts.

After much testing, Matt came up with a design that looked like bike gear. In the middle was “Mindsetz,” the name of her yet-to-be-realized clothing business.

Mindset is a word Matt has heard countless times in mentoring programs, Davis said.

Davis hooked him up with a professional graphic designer for the final design, the one he still intends to print on a T-shirt. The motto Matt has chosen for his company is printed on the equipment: stay in the fight.

He spent his afternoons after school at YES. Matt noticed that one of these boys, aged 16, was wearing damaged clothes. He told Pope that he used his own salary to buy her clothes at Target and the sneaker store next to their office. Pope insisted that he use the organization’s money.

He countered that he would match it, dollar for dollar. He called McLain for a donation.

“I think he started with $40 and ended up with $140,” Pope said, “just to take this young man shopping so he doesn’t have to be harassed or he doesn’t get whispered behind him.

On the night of the shooting, McLain said she texted Matt to check on him, as she often did. He always sent the same reply: “Auntie, I’m cool. You’re cool?”

She kept waiting for this text.

When she saw the news of the shooting on TV, she repeatedly called and texted him. “You just get your feeling in your stomach,” she said. Matt’s dad called her later that day. He was dead.

“Even now we have been blessed, because,” McLain said, “even after a tragedy like this, he left this world knowing so many people and touching so many.”

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