PHILADELPHIA — Fanta Bility didn’t want to go to the Academy Park High School football game last August. She wanted to stay home — football didn’t interest her much.
But her older sister, Mamasu, was making her debut as a member of the school’s cheerleading squad. And if there was one thing the 8-year-old loved, it was her family.
Hours later, Fanta was dead, killed by police officers responding to a shooting outside the game. Saturday will mark a year since that day, a grim anniversary for her family, who are staging a day of protest and remembrance in the girl’s honor in Sharon Hill.
Tenneh Kromah wants the community to know that amid a heated debate over police and their role in the community, she lost a daughter.
“Fanta was a good girl, she was so loved, and she gave back so much love,” Kromah said in an interview Thursday at Memorial Park, a Sharon Hill fixture that was practically Fanta’s second home in the summer months. “No matter how little she had to give, she would make sure everyone had something.”
Whether it was clothes, food, or toys, if Fanta felt she had extra, she would distribute it among her friends, Kromah said. She shared everything, including slices of the vibrant, purple unicorn cake she requested for her eighth birthday.
She loved to draw portraits of her mother, proudly presenting them to her after adding the finishing touches. At snack time, she relished competing with older brother Abu, jostling to get to the microwave first to heat up her food.
Kromah named her youngest daughter after her aunt, in the tradition of their tribe, which hails from an area near the border between Guinea and Liberia in West Africa. She and her siblings came to the United States in 2004, fleeing the bloody civil war that tore apart that region for years.
They chose Delaware County on the advice of friends and relatives who had already made a similar move seeking better opportunities, according to Abu Bility, Kromah’s brother.
“We thought we were in a safe haven,” Abu Bility said. “We were wrong.”
In 2008, he and Kromah lost their younger brother, who was killed by muggers in Southwest Philadelphia. It was an enormous tragedy for the family, they said, so much so that their mother returned to Liberia, unable to handle the stress.
They never fathomed they would suffer another loss, especially in such a public manner.
On Aug. 27, Kromah said she felt safe at the local high school football game, in part because of the number of police officers who were there.
As the game let out, gunfire erupted, and a crowd of dozens ran for cover. Kromah spotted her daughter, collapsed on the ground, covered in blood.
Fanta died in her mother’s arms, struck by one of 25 rounds shot into the crowd by three Sharon Hill police officers as spectators were leaving the stadium. Even now, a year later, Kromah doesn’t know which of the three fired the fatal shot: The bullet was too degraded for investigators to trace it back to a specific gun.
But it matters little, her family said Thursday.
“With everything going on, we don’t want to lose sight that she was just a little girl who lost her life,” Fanta’s cousin Siddiq Kamara said. “She was innocent in all of this, and my family, we’re all still hurting.”
Four days after the shooting, as Fanta’s loved ones gathered to honor and remember her in a ceremony at a mosque in West Philadelphia, the imam spoke of peace and healing. As mourners prayed, Kromah wept quietly in the back of the room.
Fanta’s cousins, teachers, and classmates recalled the few, precious memories of her short life. Her love of vanilla ice cream and dancing. Her obsession with TikTok.
“People don’t realize that my family, we’re still undergoing trauma,” Kamara said. “We suffered a loss, but we also witnessed it happen.”
The officers charged in Fanta’s death — Sean Dolan, Brian Devaney, and Devon Smith — told a grand jury they were aiming at a Chevrolet Impala that had stopped abruptly in front of them outside the stadium. They said they mistakenly believed that the vehicle, driven by two Academy Park alumni who had arrived late to the game, was the source of gunshots they had heard about a block away.
But police say the shots that rang out that day were fired by two teens, Angelo Ford and Hasein Strand, who shot at each other with illegal guns after a petty argument during the game. Prosecutors initially charged the teens with first-degree murder under the legal theory of transferred intent, saying their actions set in motion the events that led to Fanta’s death.
But after the grand jury concluded that the three officers were to blame — and amid significant public outcry over the teens’ arrest — Delaware County District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer withdrew those charges. Strand is serving a six-year sentence in state prison after pleading guilty to aggravated assault for wounding another bystander. Ford faces similar charges but remains at large after escaping a juvenile detention center in Western Pennsylvania.
Smith, Devaney, and Dolan were fired days after they were charged with manslaughter, reckless endangerment, and related offenses in January. In the months since, their attorneys have sought to have the manslaughter charges withdrawn, saying that Stollsteimer’s initial decision to charge the teens was appropriate and that their actions caused Fanta’s death.
The lawyers have said the officers were being “unfairly targeted because of their profession.” Prosecutors, meanwhile, say the officers should have known better than to fire their weapons toward a moving vehicle, especially in the direction of a large crowd.
Sharon Hill Borough officials hired former Philadelphia prosecutor Kelley Hodge to independently investigate the shooting, review the department’s use-of-force policy, and make recommendations on how to improve community relations.
But when her 55-page report was released to the public in July, it was almost entirely redacted. Borough officials said the full text could not be shared — even with Fanta’s family — because of the pending criminal charges against the officers and a civil suit the family filed after the child’s death.
Kromah said she and her relatives were hurt and offended by that. The official lack of candor about the events leading up to the shooting that claimed Fanta’s life is upsetting, she said. But in time, as the criminal case heads to court and the civil suit proceeds, Kromah and her family hope to learn the truth about Fanta’s death, and they hope that will give them some measure of solace.
Saturday’s day of remembrance will feature a march through Sharon Hill to focus on the justice the family says it’s seeking but has found elusive. But mostly, they said, family and friends will gather to honor and remember the 8-year-old who graced their lives.
“Our priority right now is to keep her name alive,” Kamara said. “She was loved.”
