Lil' boy lost

(from gaycitynews.com/swipe from keithboykin.com/click link for full text)
A Gay Child Lost in New York

Mother charges police are neglecting search for 14-year-old son who came out just months ago

By DUNCAN OSBORNE

Alelia Newsome had been talking in a calm voice about her child, Edmond Tillman, missing since early August. She did not grow angry when she spoke of the police department that she believes never really searched for her 14-year-old son.

She was not frustrated when she spoke of the phone calls that began after his disappearance. They were from someone who did not hang up, but did not speak. Newsome assumed it was Eddie and so she spoke until the line went dead.


But after 90 minutes of discusing her son’s case in soft, subdued tones, as she took the photos of Eddie out of her purse, she began to cry quietly. When she looked at his school ID, her weeping became uncontrollable.


“I feel like I did something wrong,” Newsome said. “I lost my child.”


She last saw Eddie on August 10 when she dropped him off at a school on Manhattan’s Lower East Side where he was to take a test that would determine if he could advance to the eighth grade.


“I dropped him off in the morning,” Newsome said. “I gave him some money to get some breakfast, I watched him go into school.”


Two months earlier Eddie had come out to her. That had not caused any problems in the Marcy Houses apartment in Bushwick that Eddie shared with his mother and his three sisters.


“I accepted him,” Newsome said. “He told me two months before that he was having feelings for men. I accepted him. I told him I still loved him... There wasn’t no argument or anything before he left.”