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With Son Facing Paralysis After Shooting, Mother Chooses to 'Let Him Go'

By DNAinfo Staff on August 18, 2013 1:10pm

  Antoine Green, 19, was fatally shot while riding a bike late Saturday night in West Garfield Park.
Antoine Green
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WEST GARFIELD PARK — Aquanna Jackson told the doctors to pull the plug on her son Sunday morning.

He was brain dead, they said.

"The doctors said his heart stopped twice and every time they brought it back, it sent damage to his brain," Jackson said at her West Garfield Park home. "They asked, 'Do you want us to keep trying or do you want us to let him go?' "

"I told them to let him go. I didn't want to see him like that."

Jackson's son, 19-year-old Antoine Green, was shot while riding his bicycle at 11:50 p.m. Saturday in the 800 block of South Lawndale Avenue, near his boyhood home.

Green had just left his friends when two people on bicycles shot at him before fleeing west on Arthington Street.

He was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 3:24 a.m. Sunday, according to the Cook County Medical Examiner's Office.

The shooting may have been gang- or drug-related, but just hours after the shooting the exact motive was unclear, police said.

Though Green had a criminal record and a gang affiliation, according to police, Jackson said there was nothing in his background that would make him a target.

Green's mother called her son "a good boy" who played basketball in nearby Douglas Park and dreamed of becoming a big time rapper under the name "Twil."

"He originally wanted to be a football player, but once he heard of 50 Cent, that became his life," Jackson said.

After the family moved southwest from his childhood home near Independence Boulevard and Arthington four years ago, Green recorded tracks in a makeshift studio in a bedroom in their new apartment.

That studio remained until very recently, family said.

Jackson said her decision to take her son off life support was partially motivated because she couldn't stand the thought of her son, who made it to his junior year of high school at Henry Ford Academy's Power House High School before dropping out, continuing life without being able to follow that dream.

"All he did was rap and that's all he wanted to do," Jackson said. "I thought he was going to make it."