Anyone who knew Eric Washington knew that he had two great loves in his life: his mother and the Los Angeles Rams football team.

Washington was shot and killed on 4 July alongside Meah Bordenave-Jenkins, a 19-year-old aspiring nurse, while at a block party in Compton, California. With his death, the Los Angeles region lost a homegrown community organizer who worked in the city and county’s most underserved neighborhoods.

Friends and colleagues have pointed out the tragic irony that someone who so forcefully worked to repair the issues that lead people to use firearms to settle their conflicts has had his life cut short by violence.

Washington, 37, was born and raised in Compton and worked with community advocacy and violence prevention groups in the city and in nearby Watts.

He was a prominent figure in local government, among violence prevention groups and with youth development organizations. At the time of his passing he was working as a community engagement manager for the city’s housing authority and was known for going door to door in low-income housing developments to make sure residents’ needs were met.

Washington was known to mentor local kids and teenagers and often leveraged his connections in local government to help violence intervention groups connect their participants with job opportunities and other support services that can keep them from being on either side of a violent conflict.

Researchers and elected officials have partially credited this sort of work, especially when done in coordination with agencies that offer mental health and other support services, with driving down shootings and homicides since they reached unprecedented highs in 2020 and 2021.

His work spanning so many sectors, Washington’s friends, family and local officials say, makes the loss that much more pronounced.

“That’s what hurts me. The acknowledgment of what’s lost,” Washington’s mother, Tina Johnson, said. “All these different organizations are all tentacles of one octopus. They all need to move in order for it to work. And I feel like Eric really embodied that.”

“He tried everything possible to save Black and Brown boys in our community, especially against gun violence, and I am dismayed that what he fought against took his life,” California assemblymember Mike Gipson said in a statement. Washington had previously worked as an aide in Gipson’s office.

“Eric did not deserve this,” echoed former Compton councilmember Michelle Chambers, who had known Washington for a decade. “It’s hard for us to come to grips with. He had such a huge prosperous life ahead of him. Even though he had reached some benchmarks of greatness, he was not done.”

Washington was reportedly attempting to de-escalate a conflict that involved an armed man before he was shot. Authorities have not yet identified a suspect in his killings, but on 17 July, the Los Angeles district attorney announced that a 54-year-old man had been charged with killing Bordenave-Jenkin and injuring two others.

Chambers hopes that people who were present the night of the shooting will come forward with information about who fired the bullets that killed Washington.

She argued that part of the blame for the events of 4 July rests with the city and sheriff’s department, who she says failed to enforce the city’s fireworks ban and disperse the crowd at the unsanctioned gathering. The city of Compton did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Washington grew up in Compton, and briefly left the city to get his master’s degree at Grambling State University in Louisiana. He returned in 2019 and began doing administrative work for the violence intervention group 2nd Call, which reaches out to the people most likely to be shot or shoot someone else. He later worked as a field deputy for Gipson, serving as a liaison between the assemblymember’s office and residents to address quality-of-life issues in the area.

This insistence on returning to the neighborhoods he grew up in, while admirable, Johnson said, has also led to conflicting feelings in the weeks since his death.

“Why couldn’t you just mind your own business? Why couldn’t you just get in your car and leave? Why do you care if they have guns there?” she asks herself at times.

But, she said: “It was so important for Eric to reach back out to the boys and the girls of these communities and have them realize that there’s opportunity here, that you can make your community better.”

Johnson was in Texas when she heard her son had been shot and was in bad condition. She remembers screaming a scream that she’d never heard from herself before. “I couldn’t stop,” she said.

She headed straight to the airport and just before she checked in for her flight to Los Angeles, a doctor called to tell her that Washington succumbed to his injuries.

Now, she said, her focus was on organizing Washington’s funeral, meeting with the detectives who are investigating the shooting and trying to ensure that Bordenave-Jenkins’s story gets the same amount of attention that her son’s has received.

Johnson stood alongside the teen’s mother, Ebone Jenkins during the press conference announcing the arrest and charges.

“Eric is leaving a great legacy behind. She didn’t even have a chance to create one,” Johnson said about Bordenave-Jenkins.

Before his death, Washington booked his mom a trip in August to the Bahamas to celebrate her birthday. She’ll go, she said, though she fears the quietness of the beach and worries that the stillness will force thoughts of her firstborn and the sadness that his death brings into her mind.

“‘I’m afraid of just laying on the beach by some pretty water,” she said. “I’m scared of thinking about him all the time. Thinking about the fact that he’s gone. Knowing that he’ll never come back. That’s scary.”