Sammie Willis was a talker. He held court from his wheelchair—the man was a fixture at the gate to his small, cinder block apartment complex in Overtown—and talked to his neighbors, to the parents walking their kids to school, to the young men who cycled through this block. He greeted them all with a booming voice that resonated down the street. He talked to them about their families. About God. About love. About the hard things in life.
Sammie could talk about anything. Sometimes he talked so much and for so long, his wife and partner of 25 years, Katherine Willis, jokes that she would ask him for a little silence.
He was also, by family accounts, a man of his word.
So when Sammie’s then-15-year-old son, Aaron Willis, survived a gunshot wound that left him paraplegic, Sammie did what he knew how to do. He made a promise to his son: He would talk to God and ask him to heal the boy.
Almost every day for five years after Aaron was shot off his bicycle by a stranger in a white car (there were never any suspects; everyone’s best guess was a case of mistaken identity), Sammie would wake up around 3 o’clock in the morning. He would get into his own wheelchair and roll out the door of the ground-floor apartment—the one he loved so much he told his landlord they’d have to remove his dead body before he’d ever leave. He would make his way to the front gate, stare up at the church across the street, and start talking to God.
“When he makes you a promise, he fulfills it,” says Katherine.
But now the street is a little quieter. Sammie Willis died at home on Dec. 30 from complications related to prostate cancer. He was 75.
“You never think about not having somebody there. The first thing I know that I’ll always see before I get to the gate is Sam,” says Pierre Beaton, who was raised by Sammie and saw him as a father. “Now when you come here, it’s like… that missing piece when you come here.”
Sammie talked at length to WLRN for last year’s series,Young Survivors: The Unspoken Trauma of Gun Violence. He was blunt about the scars—seen and unseen—carried by his family. He talked about how his own need for a wheelchair, brought on by years of chronic medical conditions, helped him understand Aaron's struggles. He talked about Aaron’s suicide attempt, but he also talked about how proud he was of Aaron’s successes: graduating high school, going to college, working with researchers to test experimental robotic legs.
He hoped Aaron could become a motivational speaker.
The Willis family set up aGoFundMe account to pay for expenses related to Sammie’s death.
This story has been updated with the correct date of death for Sammie Willis.
