“Long live my heart,” reads part of a memorial for 18-year-old Deon Kay, who a D.C. police officer fatally shot on Wednesday afternoon.

On Friday evening, friends of Kay gathered in front of the the apartment building in Congress Heights where the shooting occurred. They added a poster with his photo on it to a small memorial that had already begun with stuffed animals, candles, and other mementos. The teens took turns writing messages for him like “Ima miss ya boy” and “We love you” as they consoled one another. (They agreed to be photographed and declined to be interviewed.)

“You shouldn’t do that to a kid — that’s not right,” said 6-year-old Ariel, who stood near the memorial on Friday night. Her family lives in the Congress Heights apartment building right across from where the killing occurred, and she and her 10-year-old brother were in the living room when it happened.

Her mother, Amoni, said she couldn’t fall asleep after Kay’s killing on Wednesday. “My bed is literally right there, or it was, and so I just kept thinking about that kid,” she said.

District officials identified Alexander Alvarez as the Metropolitan Police Department officer who shot Kay, who is Black, and released bodycam footage on Thursday. (An emergency law passed by the D.C. Council earlier this summer requires MPD to release bodycam footage and the names of involved officers within five days of a fatal police shooting.)

The footage from Alvarez’s camera shows him exiting his police car and approaching a parked car in a Congress Heights parking lot. The officer chased one person, who has not been identified, and told him “don’t move” multiple times. Then, the officer turned around and saw Kay.

Kay had a gun in his hand, the footage shows. Alvarez fired his gun once and struck Kay in the chest, according to D.C. officials, who added that the gun was ultimately recovered nearly 100 feet away. The 18-year-old died of his injuries at a hospital. D.C. police and the U.S. Attorney’s Office of D.C. have launched investigations into the fatal shooting, which is standard policy, and involved officers have been placed on administrative leave.

A few miles away, in Barry Farm, Angela Payton was cooking up a storm.

Payton, who runs a TikTok recipes account with hundreds of thousands of followers, held a Friday night drive-thru fish fry out of her kitchen. She’s donating part of the proceeds to Kay’s mother and hopes to do more in the future.

She knew Kay from the community and said she often felt like another mother to him. “I knew him for two years, but it felt like a lifetime,” she said. When she learned about Kay’s death she was “devastated —that’s not even a strong enough word for me.”

Payton described him as “always very respectful, lovable, and he just loved people — especially the ones he loved, if that makes sense, and the ones he was close to.”

As she talked, cars rolled up and young men helping her out delivered containers of food to the motorists.

She believes cooking can help to bring the community together. “There’s a lot of hurt and broken hearts right now,” she said. “And soul food, it really do touch your soul.”

The night of Kay’s fatal shooting, protesters gathered outside the 7th District police station. “He was a good child,” said Earline Black, who identified herself as Kay’s aunt, during the demonstration at the Alabama Avenue SE police station. “I want justice.”

Demonstrators also converged outside Mayor Muriel Bowser’s home that evening and the following morning, calling on her to fire D.C. Police Chief Peter Newsham and defund the police. There are additional protests and vigils planned in memory of Kay throughout Labor Day weekend.

In a public briefing on Thursday, Bowser and Newsham expressed their sympathy to Kay’s family, and also painted the teen as someone who had previous interactions with police.

“What I know is our officer was trying to take guns off the street and what I know is he encountered somebody with a gun,” Bowser said.

Newsham declined to say whether he believed the shooting was justified on Thursday because the investigation was just beginning. “There is a lot of work yet to be done before we come up with any conclusions,” he said.

Police accountability activists have condemned Kay’s killing. “Deon should be alive but on Wednesday he was murdered,” said Stop Police Terror DC and Black Lives Matter DC in a joint statement, which called on Bowser to fire Newsham and Alvarez, launch a full investigation into Kay’s death, and to defund MPD while investing in community-led resources.

“The idea that recovering a gun is worth the life of a child should be horrifying to every D.C. resident.” said Makia Green, a core organizer with Black Lives Matter DC, in the statement. “Meeting violence with violence has never worked, yet the D.C. government insists on continuing that failed tactic — instead of providing well-funded resources and services like violence interruption, quality education, mental and physical health care, and housing.”

The groups also accuse the city of bringing up negative details about Kay. “Perpetuating the myth that ‘perfect victims’ exist is dangerous and reinforces the myth that only some Black lives matter,” said BLM core organizer April Goggans.

On Friday night, members of the newly created D.C. Police Reform Commission also took issue with Newsham’s public characterizations of Kay. In their first meeting with the police chief, commissioners accused him of trying to “vilify” and “adultify” the 18-year-old.

Standing in front of her home in an apron, Payton said that Kay was “very kid-like, child-like. She hopes that people “never judge a book by its cover and always know that everybody has made mistakes in the past,” she said. “We should be slow to judge.”