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Tevin Davis, 23, Killed; He'd Helped Push Education For Struggling Teens

 Tevin Davis, 23, was shot to death in Garfield Park on Tuesday.
Tevin Davis, 23, was shot to death in Garfield Park on Tuesday.
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CHICAGO — A shooting in Garfield Park killed Tevin Davis, 23, who'd appeared in a campaign to support education for struggling students after he was shot and wounded as teen.

At 8:32 p.m. Tuesday, the man was in a parked car in the 2700 block of West Gladys Avenue when someone walked up, fired shots and ran away, police said. He was hit in his head.

Davis, of the 1300 block of South Christiana Avenue, was pronounced dead at 10:46 p.m., according to the Cook County Medical Examiner's Office. An autopsy showed he died from multiple gunshot wounds in a homicide.

Davis, known as "Tman," had been featured in a video for the campaign Undroppable. Undroppable makes videos about students who "are going through a lot" but work hard to graduate.

In the video, Davis said he had been shot in one of his legs and thought he would die while a teen in high school.

"A lot of kids killing each other 'cause they scared. You gotta walk around with guns on you. They ain't fighting no more. They're killing each other out here. They shooting," he said. "I could have been dead just by walking on the corner around the wrong place, wrong time — really, around the wrong people."

Davis got a job after that shooting and dedicated himself to school, friends wrote online, and he was eventually named the Most Improved Senior.

"We watched you grow from a boy to a man," a friend wrote online. "You went through so much at one point in time. Anybody else would have folded but you didn't.

"You were supposed to beat the statistics. And all they did was made you a part of it."

Davis, who friends called "father of the year," also frequently posted photos of his young son, joking about how they were always together and looked alike.

In one post, Davis said he was proud of his son for being selected to go to a gifted school — and said he'd always wanted his son "to be better [than] me." In another, Davis wrote that he wanted to send his son to college.

"I can be on the streets, sell drugs, or go to school and be somebody in life," Davis said in the Undroppable video. "So I pick I go to school and be somebody."

No one was in custody.