By Jon Schuppe
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
EAST HARLEM — The last time Fifi Nelson heard her 34-year-old nephew’s voice, it was the sound of him shouting outside the Lincoln Houses in East Harlem last Wednesday afternoon.
A few minutes later, she heard a series of loud pops. Then, someone frantically calling her name.
“It’s Dereck,” the person said.
She hurried to the shooting scene on East 132nd Street and saw him bleeding on the sidewalk, paramedics trying to revive him. By the time they got to Harlem Hospital, Dereck Nelson, a father of two children with a third on the way, was dead, allegedly at the hands of a 16-year-old boy.
A memorial to Dereck Nelson outside the building in Lincoln Houses where he grew up. (DNAinfo/Jon Schuppe)On Monday, Fifi Nelson, 48, stood in her apartment in Lincoln Houses in a daze, her eyes swollen, leafing through old pictures of her nephew, whom she’d raised after the death of his mother in 1982. She was preparing to bury him the next day alongside his mother at a cemetery in New Jersey. Outside, neighbors and friends had erected two makeshift memorials to him, one at the murder scene, the other outside her apartment building.
“Derek and I loved each other like no other,” Nelson said. “Forever.”
His killing confused her. Although he had a history of drug arrests, primarily for marijuana, and had sold crack, Dereck Nelson was not a violent person, she said. She didn’t know Mark Acevedo, the 16-year-old boy arrested Friday for shooting him in the chest. But police told her they expect to make other arrests. That made her suspect that the gunman was working for someone else.
In the absence of answers, Nelson was remembering her nephew as a man who was good with his hands, whether it was fixing a stereo or massaging a knot out of her back. Known in Lincoln Houses as “Trek,” he never graduated high school, but joined Job Corps, got a GED, and drove an Access-A-Ride bus. The officers from the 25th Precinct knew him as a drug dealer, but they never caught him with much, she said.
He had six siblings, including a sister in the Army who was headed back to the city for Tuesday’s funeral.
“He came from a good family,” Nelson said. “We’re going to miss him.”
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