Aurora resident Terrelle Suggs wanted his mom to rent horses so he and his sister, Cherrelle, could ride around town for their 21st birthday in March.
You can’t do that in Aurora, protested their mom, Ayanda Suggs.
But he knew a guy, he said.
“That horse (is going to) buck and throw you off, then what are you going to do?” she recalled saying.
So Terrelle dug up an old photograph of him as a child straddling a gray and white pony, one hand on the reins, the other holding a red cowboy hat.
He was funny like that, Ayanda Suggs said. Some family members called him the “Wal-Mart rollback” for his round face and perpetual grin.
He loved the family dog and always wanted some kind of animal, his mother said. They’ve had rabbits, birds and a gerbil named Harmony. Lately he’d been wanting a parrot.
But Terrelle Suggs, 20, of the 900 block of New Haven Avenue in Aurora, was shot in the head during a drive-by shooting at 9:44 p.m. Jan. 13 at Orchard Road and Jericho Road in Montgomery. He was transported to Presence Mercy Medical Center in Aurora, then airlifted to Loyola Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead the next morning.
Suggs, who was born in Naperville, had been driving northbound on Orchard with three passengers when another vehicle pulled alongside them and shot several rounds into their car, according to police.
Among the passengers was Gheroncia Suggs, listed as an honorary pallbearer at Terrelle’s funeral services. He is a 21-year-old Montgomery resident charged with attempted first-degree murder and other felonies in connection with a 2015 shooting in a parking lot on the 200 block of Hill Avenue in which a 22-year-old man from Calumet City was shot in the leg.
Gheroncia Suggs had been out on bond but is now back in custody at the Kane County Jail, accused in a motion submitted Jan. 23 by the Kane County state’s attorney’s office of violating the conditions of his previous bail by possessing a machine gun, among other offenses, in connection to a traffic stop three days after Terrelle Suggs, who has no apparent record of violent crimes, was shot.
Montgomery police, along with Aurora and North Aurora police and the Kane County Major Crimes Task Force, are still investigating Terrelle Suggs’ shooting, said Montgomery police Chief Daniel Meyers.
“This has been our No. 1 priority here, to see if we can solve this,” Meyers said.
Suggs left home for the last time less than an hour before the shooting, heading out to pick up a cousin, his mother said.
He had earned an associate’s degree from Waubonsee Community College in the fall, according to a Waubonsee spokeswoman, and was planning to continue studying sports medicine, his mom said.
“He just wanted to be successful,” she said. “He had so much life left to live.”
So did her first son, Troy Grimes, when he died in 2008 from a brain aneurysm. Troy, then 15, went as suddenly as Terrelle did, she said.
More Top Picks Best Digital Voice Recorders
“My first son, it was very bad because it was just like a shock,” she said. “You don’t expect to bury your kids, you expect your kids to bury you. But it was easier to get through because it was natural. With this one, I’m just very angry. I’m very angry that someone could take my child’s life.”
Attending a prayer vigil and her son’s services over the weekend have helped, as has her employer allowing her to work from home, but Ayanda Suggs, an accountant, knows there is a long road ahead, she said.
She said she can’t help watching her back more now, looking at people and wondering if they had something to do with her son’s killing.
“I can’t lose the last child I have,” she said about Terrelle’s twin sister. “It’s just me and Cherrelle now. She doesn’t have big brothers anymore to protect her.”
Ayanda Suggs said the twins had completely different personalities from day one.
His nickname was “Mister;” hers was “Princess.”
Terrelle was the more passive, laid-back child, while Cherrelle was the bossier one, Ayanda Suggs said. Not much got under his skin, and he looked to his sister for guidance.
Although they had each other’s backs, Terrelle got into more scrapes than Cherrelle did, she said.
When he tore some ligaments in his ankle, Cherrelle was his helper at school, making sure he got from one class to another. When he got his wisdom teeth out, she joked, she was his translator.
In a photo for their spring graduation from West Aurora High School in 2014, Cherrelle’s cap and gown are red, Terrelle’s are blue, and they pose together, smiling at each other, holding up a large white “2014.”
Together they went off to Iowa Wesleyan that fall.
She and Terrelle were in the same math class, and he’d come over to her dorm room so they could study together or just hang out, she said.
“It was always us,” Cherrelle said.
They then returned together to Aurora after the first year, enrolling at Waubonsee in fall 2015.
On the day he was shot, Terrelle called Cherrelle because he was going shopping at the outlet mall where she works and wanted to see if she was there. She was, and she asked him to bring her a strawberry lemonade. He brought it to her, and that was the last time she saw him alive.
At his funeral, at their mother’s request, Cherrelle rode on a horse pulling the wagon carrying Terrelle’s casket to the grave.
Though they’d never be able to rent horses for their shared 21st birthday, that final gesture felt important, Cherrelle said.
“One last ride with my brother.”
Twitter @hannahmleone