GRAND RAPIDS, MI – After leaving his son’s gravesite, Corey Penn picked up a couple of the teen’s best buddies and headed for a makeshift memorial on what should have been his 16th birthday.

They brought a large candle to light in his honor.

He saw the police lights and crime-scene tape from Madison Avenue SE and Hall Street, a block away on Umatilla Avenue.

Another teen, Niles Murphy, 17, had just been shot and killed Oct. 4 near the Umatilla memorial.

Penn had that same overwhelming grief, sadness and disbelief he had when his son, Amillier “Milli” Penn, 15, was fatally shot there on June 2, 2024. On the night Murphy was killed, Penn stopped and prayed for Murphy’s family.

“It crushed me,” Penn told MLive/Grand Rapids Press. “It brought back all the trauma,” with the two teens dying

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