EMMA COLEMAN The Roanoke Times
A Roanoke teen was fatally shot early Saturday in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, his family confirms.
Jakolbi Taylor, 16, was a Patrick Henry High School student and basketball star, his aunt Briana Taylor said in an interview Sunday. He also played on a TWIN Hoops Sports AAU travel team and was participating in a tournament as a substitute player on the Virginia Warriors AAU travel team in Myrtle Beach over the weekend.
“This isn’t a family vacation. My nephew came here to play basketball,” she said. “He scored 43 points in the game he played hours before his murder.”
Myrtle Beach police reported in a social media post that officers responded at about 1:10 a.m. Saturday to a shooting incident in the 1600 block of North Ocean Boulevard.
Jakolbi Taylor, 15, of Roanoke makes a lay-up during a game with his TWIN Hoops Sports travel basketball team. He was fatally shot Saturday in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where the team was participating in a tournament.Photo courtesy Briana Taylor
“This is still an ongoing investigation, and we will release more information when we can,” Randolph Angotti, the police department’s public information officer, said in an email Sunday.
Taylor said her nephew died at the scene of the shooting — a boardwalk near the ocean where he was spending time with some of his travel basketball teammates. She said no one else was injured in the gunfire incident, but Roanoke is devastated.
“If you don’t know him personally, you’ve heard of his basketball skills,” she said. “You can’t say his name in Roanoke City and they don’t go, ‘Oh, that’s the guy who plays basketball. He’s nice.’”
Taylor said her nephew was a jokester who defended the people he loved, particularly his mother and grandmother.
“My mom paid thousands of dollars to have him travel and go to basketball camps. She invested in him. She invested everything she had into him so that this wouldn’t happen, and it still happened,” Taylor said. “All of the violence in our city, we keep him in sports because of that.”
