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Slain Football Star Isayah Muller Remembered at Funeral Service

By Andrea Swalec | July 7, 2011 6:14pm | Updated on July 7, 2011 6:15pm

By Andrea Swalec

DNAinfo Reporter/Producer

HELL'S KITCHEN — Hundreds of mourners gathered at a Hell's Kitchen church Thursday for the funeral of Isayah Muller, a 19-year-old star football player stabbed to death just hours after he graduated from high school.

"I feel like a star is gone. He always came to me with a gleam on his face," said family friend Louis Hughes, 47, who said he had known Muller "since before he has born."

Muller, of East Harlem's Jefferson Houses, was remembered as enthusiastic, optimistic and "too busy with football to get into any trouble," his classmate Errol Koram, 19, said.

Pallbearers carried Muller's ivory casket with gold inlay into the Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus on West 51st Street between Ninth and 10th avenues. The running back from Truman High School in The Bronx, who led his team to its first PSAL bowl title last year, was baptized at the church and took his first Communion there.

Minister Daniel LeBlanc told those assembled, "We need to give Isayah permission to go and be with God."

Mourners passed around pamphlets with a photo of Isayah in his cap and gown on the cover. "Fly, Isayah, fly up in the sky," it read.

The teen's parents, Andre Muller and Rosa Seda-Muller, did not speak at the funeral. After the service ended, they stepped into a black limousine and did not speak to reporters.

Muller was stabbed to death in a Bronx parking lot June 28 after his graduation ceremony and a celebratory dinner.

His father allegedly got into an argument with a parking attendant, who he had accused of stealing a bottle of cologne from his car, according to NYPD spokesman Paul Browne.

Andre Muller had just left the M.T. Jerome Town Corp. garage when he realized that the cologne was gone.

He drove back and allegedly confronted a pair of workers, grabbed a snow shovel and attacked one of them, police said. Isayah raced to his father's aid, and was stabbed in the chest by one of the attendants, police said.

Andre Muller, an ex-con with convictions for robbery and drug sale, faces assault, menacing and weapons possession charges.

The attendants have not been charged.

Muller's mother has blasted prosecutors for bringing charges against her husband while letting the man who stabbed her son go free.

Tarsha Muller, 38, said that she was not only mourning her cousin's death, she was fearful about his father's fate.

"I think it's unfair that they're going on his criminal background, and the people who did it are out on the street," she said.