It is a death that has shocked an entire community.
Nearly 50 friends, family and well-wishers gathered at a Rally for Peace in front of Hoffman Park on a warm spring evening Friday, May 6, to honor Tyler Rhodes, 17, an Albany High School student who was stabbed in the park a week earlier.
A close family friend mourning the teen said the incident might have been the wakeup call the neighborhood needed.
It’s so sad they had to take him from us because we love him so much, and everyone that knew him loved him, said Sarah Acker, 35. `But I feel like they had to take someone like him to teach these kids to say it’s not worth it. It can happen to me. It happened to Tyler. These kids need so much more support than they get.`
Albany City Police Deputy Chief Steve Riley said Jah-Lah Tyree Vanderhorst, 16, of Albany allegedly stabbed Rhodes once in the chest with a knife, on Saturday April 30, and when Rhodes made an attempt to get away, Dhoruba A. Shauib, 19, of Albany, allegedly stood in his way.
Vanderhorst and Shauib have been charged with second degree murder.
Rhodes’ death has brought an onslaught of community support. Tyler’s mother, Stacey Rhodes, and stepfather Michael Sofer were on hand at the rally, which was sponsored by SNUG, a community-based violence prevention model.
`Everybody in the community has been super supportive,` Stacey said. `We can’t thank everybody.`
There is a reason that there has been so much support. Rhodes was a charismatic person described as someone whose smile would comfort you and who would give you words of encouragement, even if you only knew him in passing.
`You could be in the most serious situations, even with me being the stepfather, and I could be ready to explode, and he’ll just say something and we’ll burst out into laughter,` Sofer said. `He had the ability of reading people so well, and in turn, being able to make them each feel right in their own way. Knowing how to talk to each person, it was an amazing gift that he had.`
Acker said Rhodes was `the golden child` and that there wasn’t anything not to like about him. She said there were even kids at the rally who had only met him once and were there to show support.
The people who knew him well, said Rhodes always tried to be positive and make sure people were heading in the right direction, which tied into his dream of becoming a psychologist.
`He was the kid that said you need to get to class on time, you need to do good in school and he would teach all the young kids,` Acker said. `He was just a really positive kid. There might be kids like him, but they don’t express it the way he did.`
Colonie Central High School sophomore Bryan Tran said he didn’t know Rhodes all that well, but he did recall a night in 2009 when he was too nervous to read his poem during a Martin Luther King Jr. Speech Dedication.
Tran said he was ready to walk off stage before Rhodes tried to convince him to stay.
`He took my hand and convinced me to not go away,` he said. `That was really nice of him to do that. Then when I got back up, he was right next to me. And when I was done with my poem, he patted me on my shoulders saying, ‘Good job.’ He told me to not give up and saying, ‘You got it. There’s nothing to be afraid of.’`
Rhodes attended the South Colonie Central School District from kindergarten until eighth grade. During his time there, he became close with English teacher Marc Mostransky. Mostransky said that he never had Rhodes as a student but that he was involved in both the DJ Club as well as the poetry workshops.
Mostransky said he doesn’t usually give out his cell phone numbers to his students unless he felt they needed it. With Rhodes, Mostranksy said he could talk to him about anything, including real life situations.
The last time he spoke with Rhodes was at the Teen Poetry Slam on Friday, April 29, where they spoke for 20 minutes. Mostransky said Rhodes had never performed at one of the slams, even though he had tried to get him involved. He knew Rhodes had the ability to perform after a poem he did on gun violence that was featured on Jamz 96.3. He even performed it at South Colonie’s Martin Luther King Jr.’s Speech Dedication, which many students recalled as one of the most memorable.
But after attending the poetry slam that evening, Rhodes asked if he could do it next year.
`Here I am thinking I’m going to get a text from him in a couple of days,` he said. `While he was there at the poetry slam, he said to me, ‘I didn’t know it was like this. I’m going to do it next year’ and then we hugged. I think the important thing now is that Tyler just doesn’t become a blurb on the 5 o’clock news and gone in two weeks.`
Mostransky said he is now going to make sure the clubs he supervises will be dedicated to the memory of Rhodes and hopefully embody what he stood for.
A close friend of Rhodes’, Tiffany Alderman, a freshman at Colonie Central High School, wore a rosary that Rhodes had on him the evening of the poetry slam. She said she saw it on a table and she decided to take it, for fear something would happen. When she found out Rhodes had died on Saturday, April 30, she was in disbelief.
`I still don’t believe it to this point,` she said. `It’s hard to sink in.`
Alderman referred to him as a brother and said they would constantly talk as he would give her advice, telling her to `get her head straight.`
`He was always happy; you couldn’t be sad around him,` she said.
It was hard for her to accept his death, and she avoided some of the memorials. But she said she attended the wake and said it took her over an hour to even speak to his mother because of the number of people that were there.
`The only visual I had at the wake was that if we took everybody and we probably could have circled him 20 times around and protected him,` he said. `If we could do that, why can’t we be out there?“
