The Loss of Only Child: Javits Frimpong

The tragic killing of 15-year-old Ghanaian immigrant Javits Frimpong has reopened a familiar fear for African parents raising children in the diaspora. Beyond the tragedy lies an uncomfortable conversation about grief, bullying, identity and the price of pursuing a better life.

Some stories shock you to your core. Then there are stories that bend you over, turn you inside out and leave you struggling to find the words to explain the pain.

The senseless killing of a young child on his way to school. A child who woke up that morning, got dressed, picked up his schoolbag and stepped out of his home, expecting to return at the end of the day.

Except he never did.

Fifteen-year-old Javits Frimpong was shot and killed in the Bronx, New York, on 29 October 2026. Barely a year earlier, he had left Ghana to join his father in America. A new country. A new school. A new beginning. The promise of a better life.

His father described him as a quiet, clever boy who dreamed of becoming a doctor. He also spoke about the bullying Javits had reportedly experienced at school. Whether those incidents were connected to his death has not been established.

But I cannot stop thinking about his parents.

Who would have told that little boy, as he prepared to leave Ghana, that the better life he was travelling thousands of miles to find would end in grief so unspeakable?

The Loss of an Only Child

As a mother to an only child, my heart split into a thousand pieces when I heard Doris Adu-Gyamfi utter those words: "I have only one child."

There is something almost unbearable about those words. The finality of them. The desperation. The anguish of a mother who had sent her son across the ocean with hopes of a brighter future, only to cross that same ocean herself to mourn his death.

Javits was his mother's only child. Her one child. Her hopes, her dreams, her future.

And now he is gone.

For many immigrant families, moving abroad is a pursuit of greener pastures, a chance at a better life and the promise of the ultimate American Dream. But for families like the Frimpongs, that dream has become a nightmare from which they may never truly wake.

Although a 17-year-old suspect was arrested and charged on 11 November in connection with Javits's killing, somehow, it doesn't feel like much.

I know an arrest matters. I know justice matters. But there is a part of me, the mother in me, that wants something more. Something that might begin to account for the enormity of what has been taken.

I want to dig my claws into something and rip it apart. Something that means something to someone. That is the nature of the pain searing through my heart. An anger so deep, so visceral, that it almost frightens me.

And this is not even my child.

So what must his mother be feeling?

What does a mother do with all the love she still has for a child who is no longer here? Where does she put the dreams she had for him? The birthdays that will never come, the graduations she will never attend?

To lose anyone you love is devastating. But to lose an only child is a particular kind of heartbreak I struggle even to contemplate.

I look at my own daughter and think about the ordinary moments I take for granted. The morning school runs. The laughter. The endless questions. The simple comfort of knowing she is somewhere in the world, living and growing.

And I think about a mother who would give anything for just one more of those moments.

No arrest, conviction or sentence can ever give her that.

The Fear of Raising an African Child in the Diaspora

Javits's story is not the first.

Just weeks ago, I watched a documentary about Damilola Taylor, the ten-year-old Nigerian boy killed in London in 2000. Another young African child whose life ended violently on his way home from school.

Different circumstances. Different generations. Different cities. Yet the grief feels painfully familiar.

If I tell you that, as a parent raising an African child in the diaspora, I do not live with a constant undercurrent of worry, I would be lying.

There is a fear. A quiet, persistent one that lingers even on the days when everything seems perfectly fine.

I feel it when my daughter comes home and tells me that children as young as six and seven have told her she is not pretty. That her hair is ugly.

Six and seven.

Sometimes the rage I feel is difficult to describe. Not simply because of the cruelty, but because of what those words can do to a child who is still discovering herself.

What does it do to a little girl to repeatedly hear that her hair is ugly? At what point does she begin to believe it?

I tell my daughter she is beautiful. I teach her to love her hair, her skin and her heritage. I teach her to speak up, to challenge unkindness and never to shrink herself to make others comfortable.

But I also worry.

Because how do you teach a child to stand up for herself in a world where standing up can sometimes carry its own dangers?

We tell our children to report bullying. To walk away. To be brave. To use their voices.

But what happens when those things are not enough?

The Double Burden of Being African and an Immigrant

For African immigrants, our struggles often come in double folds. Sometimes even more. But it is not always easy to explain.

There is the obvious discrimination, the kind you can point to and challenge. Then there is the insidious kind that lives in everyday interactions, classrooms, workplaces and institutions.

The accent bias. The subtle ridicule. The assumptions about intelligence, competence and belonging.

You are not polished enough, so you get overlooked.

You are too African. Too loud. Too quiet. Too different.

Your accent becomes a measure of your intelligence. Your name becomes an inconvenience. Your culture becomes something to explain, defend or conceal.

Sometimes you are expected to be grateful simply for being allowed into the room.

And somewhere along the way, you realise that the better life you came looking for sometimes demands that you surrender parts of yourself just to belong.

And then there are our children.

Children who should be worrying about homework and friendships but are already learning to defend their hair, their skin, their names and the countries their parents came from.

Some are born in the West and know no other home, yet are made to feel like outsiders. Others arrive from Africa with their accents and innocence, only to discover that the very things that make them who they are can become reasons for ridicule.

What an extraordinary burden to place on a child.

The Better Life We Came Looking For

For many African immigrant families, migration is an act of extraordinary hope.

We leave behind parents, siblings, friendships and communities. We trade familiarity for uncertainty. We take jobs beneath our qualifications, endure loneliness and make sacrifices that few people will ever understand.

And we do these things because we believe our children will have better opportunities.

That they will flourish.

That they will be safe.

But safety is not simply the absence of war, poverty or instability. It is also the freedom to walk to school without fear, to sit in a classroom without humiliation and to exist without having to apologise for who you are.

We do not cross oceans so our children can spend their childhoods defending their identities.

We do not uproot our families so that our accents become liabilities and our children become targets.

And we certainly do not make these sacrifices imagining that the places where our children are supposed to learn and grow might become places where they feel unsafe.

I Am Tired of Teaching Children to Be Resilient

I am tired of the language of resilience being offered to people who should not have to be resilient in the first place.

I am tired of children being told to develop thicker skin when the cruelty directed at them should never have been tolerated.

And I am tired of the expectation that immigrant parents should simply be grateful for the opportunities afforded to them, even when the price of belonging is paid in humiliation, exclusion and fear.

We can be grateful for the opportunities migration has given us and still question the systems that fail us.

Because gratitude should never demand silence.

Schools must take bullying seriously. Parents must confront the prejudices their children may be learning. And institutions must understand that inclusion is not simply about who is allowed through the door, but how they are treated once they enter.

As for us parents, we will continue teaching our children to love themselves. That their hair is beautiful. That their names carry history. That their accents are not evidence of ignorance. That being African is not something to overcome.

But I wish we did not have to teach these lessons as a form of armour.

I wish my daughter could simply be seven.

I wish she could go to school without having to defend her beauty, her identity or her right to be treated kindly.

And I wish that a father could send his fifteen-year-old son to school without the possibility of receiving a call that would change his life forever.

Justice for Javits matters. So do the unanswered questions surrounding his death. But beyond this tragedy, we must confront the everyday cruelties we dismiss and the prejudices we allow to take root.

Because behind every immigrant child is often a family that has sacrificed more than anyone will ever know for the promise of a better tomorrow.

And no parent should have to wonder whether that promise will cost their child their dignity, identity or life.

A better life should never come at such a price.