CLEM MURRAY / Staff Photographer
John Scarbrough can no longer play basketball like the players behind him on the grounds of Strawberry Mansion High, where he once starred.The 23-year-old is on parole for a drug offense committed before his December 2006 shooting, and he’s trying to figure out what to do with his life.
 
By Ashley Fox (Inquirer Staff Writer)

If only for a moment, John Scarbrough saw it coming. The gun. The shooter. The flash.

And then he heard the noise, so loud and so quick and so final. It was familiar, the cold sound of gunshots. He’d pulled a trigger. But never had that sound been followed by the piercing pain Scarbrough felt in his thighs as he reached for the piece that somehow was missing from its normal hiding place.

So this was it. Approaching midnight, sitting in a pickup truck on the corner of 22d and Ontario, this was how Scarbrough’s life was going to end. No more basketball. No more music. No more hearing his grandmother’s melodic voice or feeling his mother’s embrace. John Scarbrough was about to become another body in a bag in North Philadelphia, and all because of a lousy couple of hundred bucks.

Except after getting shot point blank seven times – five in his left leg, two in his right – Scarbrough didn’t die. Not exactly. Maybe it was God. Maybe it was luck. Or maybe his long, lanky body was just strong enough to withstand the trauma after all of those years playing basketball, on the playgrounds, at the rec centers, in high school and, for those few short months before he returned to the city streets, in college.

After 31 days in the winter of 2006, doctors at Temple Hospital did what they could. They couldn’t save Scarbrough’s left leg, but they saved his life. And now, incarcerated for a previous felony drug offense, with less than five months until his parole, the 23-year-old former star forward at Strawberry Mansion is trying to decide exactly what to do with that life, since no one has much use for a one-legged drug dealer, much less a one-legged basketball player.

“Anybody can shoot,” Scarbrough said. “Try getting shot.”… Read Entire Article Here