But on the morning of March 18, 2022, Boone called his mother and said that he didn’t feel well, that his stomach hurt. She told him to go to Jefferson Hospital to see his doctor. She would meet him there.

Brookins, who lives in Pleasantville, N.J., said that when she still hadn’t heard from him after a few hours, she got into her car to drive to the hospital. But as she reached the Walt Whitman Bridge, traffic was completely stopped. She was stuck.

Then her phone buzzed. It was a text from her niece, with a screenshot from the Citizen crime app showing a grainy image of a man standing on a highway overpass at Knights and Woodhaven roads in Northeast Philadelphia.

It was her son.

Searching for answers

Brookins immediately dialed 911, desperate to know if the man standing on the ledge was, in fact, Marcus. The dispatcher confirmed it, and said police were taking him to the hospital for treatment.

She thought that meant he was OK. But when she reached Jefferson, doctors told her that her son had jumped from the overpass and suffered catastrophic injuries. Brookins sat with her child in his final moments, holding his hand, telling him how much she loved him. He died at 2:15 p.m.

There were no police officers at the hospital, she said, and no one from law enforcement reached out to explain what happened. A nurse passed along the name of an officer who’d brought Boone to the hospital, and Brookins called him the next morning, hoping for clarity.

But the detective, she said, was cold and gave little information. A lieutenant she spoke with later was the same, she said. She stopped reaching out to police because she felt rejected and intimidated. She started seeking answers on her own, combing the internet for witnesses and surveying nearby businesses for surveillance footage.

Police said her son was on the ledge from 8:30 a.m. to 11:43 a.m. that day. And she learned, through witnesses and videos she reviewed from bystanders, that during those three hours, he yelled his name and birthday to police, and asked for his mother.

But no one called her, Brookins said, and Boone was brought to the hospital as a John Doe. She also wonders, she said, why police did not deploy an inflatable device below him given the length of time he spent contemplating ending his life.

Lisa Beckler was there, and said she is haunted by the public and police response. She said some people in their cars, frustrated by the standstill traffic on busy Woodhaven Road, yelled at Boone to jump because they were late for work. Others were visibly upset with the police, questioning why there was not an ambulance or crisis responders on standby, she said. Then, in the last hour, she said, SWAT officers showed up with dogs. Boone started yelling that the police wanted to kill him.

Beckler said she tried to drown out the negativity by yelling to Boone that he was loved, that there was a future beyond this moment, that his family would be here soon.

“I didn’t know him, but he belonged to somebody,” she said. “It could have been my son up there.”

She’ll never get the image of him jumping out of her mind, she said.

‘I love you’

Brookins’ daughter, Jasmine Washington, 36, said she has watched her mother’s physical and mental health deteriorate during her search for answers about Boone’s death. It is agonizing, she said, to know that hundreds of people watched the final hours of her brother’s life, but no one will explain what happened.

But most of all, she said, she wants to know who took the photo of her brother — and why.

The family formed a Facebook group to help in their search for information.

On the second anniversary of Boone’s death, the family gathered at the overpass. They prayed, shared their favorite memories of him and added to a growing memorial on the side of the highway.

At 11:43 a.m., they released blue and white balloons into the wind.

“I love you baby,” Brookins said as she let go.

Her tear-streaked cheeks glimmered in the sunlight as she looked up to the sky — watching each balloon fly out of sight, staring into the clouds as if they might hold answers to the questions for which she’s so desperate.

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