Dietra Bynum was on the phone with her granddaughter, talking about pizza, when she heard the gunshots.
Imani Ringgold had called Bynum on her work break as she walked down Market Street in West Philadelphia on Tuesday evening. Ringgold — 20 years old, three days into a new job as a home health aide she took to save up for her upcoming college classes — wanted to tell her grandmother about the pizza she’d just bought.
Bynum listened, the way she always did, the way she had since she’d helped raise the girl like her own.
Then the cracks of gunfire burst through the speaker.
“Imani! Imani!” Bynum screamed.
She’d hoped her granddaughter had dropped the phone and run, that she’d call back soon, maybe breathless and scared. But then she heard the words of a stranger above her granddaughter’s body:
“Oh s—,” someone said, “it’s a girl.”
And she knew.
The bullets that killed Ringgold were not intended for her, police said. Investigators believe she was caught in the crossfire of a West Philadelphia gang feud, and that the three gunmen who jumped out on the corner near 60th and Market Streets around 6:20 p.m. were after the young men Ringgold was walking past, police said.
She was shot more than a dozen times.
Police have so far identified two of the four men they say are responsible for the shooting, and are asking for the public’s help in finding them. Mustafa King, 26, and Zaire Manning, 21, are wanted for murder.
Imani Nikita Nechel Ringgold was born in Philadelphia on Oct. 20, 2005, at 1:02 p.m.
Whitney Ringgold was 16 when she gave birth to her first child. Doctors initially told her she was having a boy, she said, but then she pushed and pushed and the nurses said, “It’s a girl!”
And she cried, she said — the rush of love, of fear for how her life was about to change, of how she only had boy clothes for the baby at home.
As it turned out, as her daughter grew, she started to shed the floral dresses and ruffles that her grandmother bought her for a more masculine style.
Ringgold was the oldest of four on her mother’s side, and of 10 on her father’s, her family said. She was quiet and introverted, but around people she trusted, she loved to dance.
Anytime her siblings or parents asked for help with something, she answered, whether it was picking up food or walking her teenage sister to school.
Josiah Bynum-Smokes, 17, who was like a brother to her, recalled highlights of their childhood: visiting seals at SeaWorld and getting covered in green slime at the Nickelodeon Resort in Orlando. Bynum toting them to the mall, where they bought cinnamon pretzels from Auntie Anne’s and matching outfits from Old Navy.
“Even as we grew up and grew apart, we was always together,” he said in an interview Friday.
She spoke on the phone every day with her 5-year-old brother. Bynum, 57, said now the boy keeps asking why “Mani” isn’t answering her phone.
“Do we gotta go back to the hospital to get her?” he asked.
Just two days before her death, Ringgold was accepted into the Community College of Philadelphia. She planned to enroll for the fall semester, her mother said.
The two had toured the school last week and intended to start classes together — Whitney Ringgold, 36, in the nursing program, and her daughter learning HVAC and electrical work.
On Friday afternoon, Ringgold and Bynum and extended family sat in the backyard of their Delaware County home on a charming block with yellow tulips and twittering sparrows and perfect golden sunshine.
This was the peaceful ambiance Bynum sought when she moved her family out of Southwest Philadelphia about 10 years ago. Now, she said, all she can hear is the piercing sound of those gunshots that echoed through the phone, and the cursed words that followed.
Whitney Ringgold keeps returning to Tuesday night. The hospital waiting room. Then the back room where they took her to identify her daughter’s body by the tattoo on her forearm: Whitney.
She keeps looking to her own forearm, where Imani is forever etched.