On the Harlem street where Ebony Williams lived, the summer stirs in the usual ways. The younger children play on the sidewalk or cling to their mothers on the front stoops, and everyone seems to linger outside much of the time, waiting for the heat to snap. And mostly, everyone watches everyone else.
The neighbors on Ebony's block say that they noticed something "going wrong" with the child. Time and again, they saw her running in tears from her building or huddling in doorways with men probably twice her age. She was just a few weeks past her 13th birthday, and the neighbors said that it was not uncommon for her to dash home at nearly any hour of the night.When word rippled down the street over the past few days that Ebony was dead, that her body was found two weeks ago beneath a highway overpass in the Bronx, the neighbors - the mothers especially - cried. They had tried to caution her about the dangers of the street, they said, but were still left with a mourner's feeling that they had not done enough.
"I told her, `Baby, you better be careful, you better take care,' " said Kathleen Eaton, who lives across the street. "But she wasn't listening. Her head was someplace else."
Detectives, who arrested two suspects in her killing before they even knew her name, called Ebony a "chronic runaway." It was one way of explaining how she could have fallen victim to so gruesome a crime. They said that she might have been raped, her throat had been slashed, and her body stuffed into a cardboard box.
The detectives also wondered aloud why her mother, Yvonne Hill, had not reported her missing until Aug. 31, 10 days after she was last seen, and they said that it might be a matter for the city's child protective services. The Daily News had reported that Hill had complained that the courts had rejected her petition to place her daughter in a juvenile detention program.