Police Shooting Victim Remembered in Emotional Funeral Service

[Updated April 7, 2012 | 3:15 p.m.] Hundreds of mourners surrounded the grieving family of Kendrec McDade as the 19-year-old teenager was eulogized in an emotional funeral service at Metropolitan Baptist Church in Altadena Saturday morning.

McDade was shot to death on March 24 by Pasadena police responding to a false 911 call of an armed robbery. Officers pursuing McDade say they thought he was reaching for a gun in his pants waistband and opened fire. In fact, McDade was unarmed.

Parents Kenneth McDade and Anya Slaughter were accompanied by more than a dozen close relatives, including grandfather Alfred McDade wearing his grandson’s blue football jersey emblazoned with the number 18.

Slaughter carried her month-old son Keion in her arms.

The crowd, estimated at 700 by a church deacon, included dozens of Azusa High School faculty and students. A group of the students tried to block television cameras from taping the family and casket after the service.

During the service mourners heard family and mourners talk about the young man affectionately called “Mac.”

Nicole Comas read a tribute from Anya Slaughter, McDade’s mother.

“I want you to know how proud I am of the man you grew up to be,” Slaughter wrote.

Reading from the obituary Amanda Brown said McDade was “often the life of the parties” and that he “had a tattoo of a halo representing that he was his mother’s angel.”

“Kendric’s life ended tragically at the hands of another,” Brown read, “wonderful memories and knowing that he was a beautiful person are the things we will always treasure.”

One Azusa High School faculty member told the crowd that McDade “will always be loved” at the high school, saying he had been quiet around the school but not on the athletic field, where McDade excelled at football.

Among the remembrances, there were references to the circumstances of McDade’s death.

Joe Brown, President of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Pasadena branch, told the McDade’s parents that his organization “will not forsake you or permit injustice to go unspoken to.”

Brown seemed to be taking the police to task, saying “It takes a lion to tangle with a lion, and the Pasadena NAACP and the State NAACP are preparing to do battle with failure to comply with policy, procedure and guidelines.”

“There will be a ‘Rumble in the Jungle,’” Brown said.