Her deaf son was murdered in NYC, so she moved to Georgia. Then tragedy struck again.

A newspaper story about her first murdered son begins in the middle of the night at a New York City bus stop.

Kevin Lazare, 25 years old and deaf, was out late playing basketball.

His mother had asked him not to go.

“Too cold,” she told him. “Stay home.”

Hours later, about 1:30 a.m. on Jan. 23, 2004, while he was waiting in Brooklyn to catch a bus for the two-mile ride home, Lazare was shot and killed. He died in front of a junior high school.

The following day, a story in the New York Times said a cop had heard gunfire in the distance and soon found Lazare “lying in a pool of blood with three bullet holes in his North Face parka.”

The newspaper write-up ends at the crime scene:

While some of Mr. Lazare's relatives set up a memorial on the sidewalk in front of the school yesterday, with candles shielded from the wind by a paper-towel box, others tried to clean up the frozen blood that had congealed there. Eventually a custodian came out of the school and offered them some cleaning fluid.

The article closes with a quote from Lazare’s mother, Kathleen Mano.

“I want to take my kids,” she said, “and get out of here.”

‘No snow’

It would take the better part of three years, but get out of New York she would.

There were too many bad memories and there was too much ache in Brooklyn. Kathleen cried all the time.

She still had three other sons and a daughter to take care of.

Kathleen had first moved to the big city from her native Trinidad in the early 1980s. Life was good in America. She ran a clothing store. But after Kevin’s death, New York no longer felt like home. Florida, on the other hand, sounded promising — and warm.

So one day in 2007, she and some relatives drove south in search of a fresh start. They stopped for the night in the middle of Georgia. At a motel along Interstate 75, her son, Kareem Mano, who had just turned 15, said, “Why don’t we stay here?”

They were in Macon. The weather was hot compared to New York, Kareem said.

And, he told his mom, “No snow.”

Kathleen Mano rode around town. She liked what she saw. The houses were bigger, with yards and space between them. Folks were friendly.

“Where we come from,” Kathleen told herself, recalling her days growing up in Trinidad, “I could get along with anybody.”

Macon just seemed right, and — perhaps most of all — safe.

‘No problems’

The Manos moved into a house in the Bloomfield section of Macon.

“Looked like we wouldn’t have no problems,” Kathleen, now 59, said recently.

With her thick Caribbean accent, she made friends at a West Indian market near her house.

She preferred keeping to herself, though, staying home, baking and cooking. She prepared the native dishes her family came to love in Brooklyn. Kareem’s favorite was oxtail with stew peas and rice. He liked his mom’s fried plantains.

The teenage Kareem attended Southwest High. Kathleen said he was her “spoiled baby,” the only one of her children who looked like her. They had the same broad cheeks and wide smiles. People kidded that they were twins.

By the time he was 20, Kareem was a clerk at local convenience marts. Sometimes he worked six and seven days a week, much of the time pulling all-night shifts.

He became a fixture at the Wash Pot store on Anthony Road and, later, at Citgos on Pio Nono Avenue and Rocky Creek Road.

In 2012, he was arrested on a marijuana-possession charge, but other than that he doesn’t appear to have been in much trouble.

“Nobody ain’t perfect,” his mom said.

Kareem was fond of wearing gold chains. His girlfriend’s grandmother, Rosetta Floyd, liked the way he doted on her granddaughter’s children from a previous relationship. Floyd, 65, also liked his necklaces. She thought it precious when he offered to buy her one for Valentine’s.

“I never seen nobody that sweet,” Floyd said. “And he was so crazy about them kids.”

Earlier this year, Kareem’s girlfriend gave birth to his son. They named him Kareem Mano Jr.

Sajeva Buckner, who used to run the Caribbean grocery where Kathleen Mano shopped, described Kareem as “very giving.”

She said that on occasion when customers at stores where Kareem worked came in with no money for gas or food, Kareem gave them what they needed. He had the cost deducted from his paycheck.

“That’s the kind of heart he had,” said Buckner, 46. “He looked after everybody.”

Kareem took care of himself too.

He carried a Tec-9 semiautomatic pistol.

Maybe in part because of what happened back in Brooklyn to his half-brother, Kevin, in a slaying that has never been solved. And also because of the hours Kareem worked, often alone.

“You have to have a gun,” Buckner said.

‘My baby’

One day last month, 13 years and a month to the day that Kevin was killed, Kareem stopped by his mother’s house.

By then, she had moved out of Bloomfield and was living in a neighborhood north of Macon Mall. Her place there has a neat lawn, a brick chimney, a massive oak shading the driveway.

The day Kareem dropped by, Feb. 23, his baby boy was with him.

Kareem said he was on his way to get a haircut, a “shape-up,” he called it.

He asked his mom to keep Kareem Jr. while he was gone.

“Watch my little man for me,” he said.

Sometime that afternoon, not long after 3 o’clock, Kareem met up with another young man in the parking lot of USA Grocery.

Kareem’s father, Kenneth Mano Sr., works at the store. The elder Mano, a clerk, had been there earlier in the day. The gas mart sits next to a Family Dollar in the Bloomfield curve at the west end of Rocky Creek Road.

Footage from a security camera outside the store shows the other man, De’Andre Malik Thomas, step out of a white car and walk behind it to talk to Kareem.

There apparently was some dispute about a cellphone Kareem had sold or given to the 20-year-old Thomas. A friend of Kareem’s has suggested that before the two men met that day someone may have fired shots at a house where Kareem’s girlfriend stayed. Asked if there was any such shooting, investigators declined to discuss the matter.

That afternoon in the parking lot, two minutes and 20 seconds into Kareem’s encounter with Thomas — a confrontation that included shoulder-to-shoulder jostling and, at times, shouting — Kareem pulled the Tec-9 pistol from his waistband. He gripped it, muzzle down, by his right leg.

Twelve seconds later, he stuffed it back in his pants without ever aiming it at Thomas.

A dozen seconds after that, Kareem bodied up to Thomas, bumping and crowding him.

Thomas gave ground — one, two, three steps.

Within six seconds of the first bump, Thomas feinted to his right, then reached into his pocket, pulled a pistol and came up firing.

Kareem, his own gun still tucked away, recoiled and sprinted toward the fuel pumps in front of store. But he couldn’t escape the bullets as Thomas chased after him, gun blazing.

Kareem collapsed beside a Ford Expedition near the pumps. He died in the parking lot of a gunshot wound to the chest.

Thomas dashed toward the Family Dollar and disappeared. He turned himself in to police the next day and was charged with murder.

In the moments after the killing, Kenneth Mano Sr. heard about it before his wife did. He couldn’t bear telling her that their son was dead. All he told her was that Kareem had been shot.

When Kathleen was driven to where the police had taken Kareem’s body, her blood pressure skyrocketed and she broke down.

“That’s my baby!” she cried. “That’s my son!”

Medics put her in an ambulance, but she wouldn’t go to the hospital. All she wanted was to see about Kareem, who was lying there dead with his eyes open.

“She kept closing his eyes, and he kept opening his eyes,” said Buckner, Kathleen’s friend who was with her that afternoon. “She kept closing and closing, and he kept looking up.”

‘This hurts’

The other day, Kathleen was on the sofa in her front room.

She dug through boxes of photos, family albums, trying to find a 2004 newspaper clipping about Kevin’s death.

“It’s so hard to see my first son and my last son get killed,” she said.

Kathleen has a tattoo on her left arm.

It reads, “R.I.P.” with the name “Kevin” etched over a heart.

Now Kareem is gone. He was buried March 3 at Cherry Blossom Memorial Gardens.

“This hurts so bad. … I’m so weak,” Kathleen said.

She couldn’t find the news clipping about Kevin.

Meanwhile, Buckner, Kathleen’s friend, sat on the sofa beside her.

“She keeps saying, ‘I’m in a dream. I’m in a dream,’” Buckner said. “Reality really hasn’t hit.”

Some nights, Kathleen can’t sleep.

The only thing that keeps her going is her grandson, Kareem Jr.

Some days, she babysits him.

“I will do all the best for that child,” she said.

A visitor in her living room — a reporter who had come to hear Kevin’s story and, now, Kareem’s — asked her about gun violence.

Guns scare her.

“Everything is gun, gun,” she said.

“There is so much love out there. I mean, if you have a problem, talk it over.”

Kathleen patted her chest.

She sounded out of breath, overwhelmed.

“I just buried my son and I moved down here and the same thing,” she said, her voice breaking. “Repeat, repeat, repeat. I can’t believe it.”

She couldn’t go on.

But just then in a back room, Kareem Jr. woke up.

This story was originally published March 17, 2017 at 3:03 PM with the headline "Her deaf son was murdered in NYC, so she moved to Georgia. Then tragedy struck again.."