"Nobody can stop it"

Theresa Custalow's son was standing on a doorstep in South Philadelphia, talking to his 14-year-old friend when bullets fired from a passing vehicle ripped through the night air.

The 14-year-old fell into her son's arms, Custalow said. Smeared with blood, the woman's son ran to get help from police at a mobile police station parked a half-block away.

"My boy lays the other boy down and runs to the truck right there and said, 'Somebody's been shot,' " Custalow said, pointing to the truck still parked in the 2600 block of Tasker Street yesterday. "They told my son, 'Get away from the truck. Nobody's been shot.' "

"What the hell are they here for?" asked Custalow, who did not want her 15-year-old son's name used in this story for fear of retaliation.

...Greg Bucceroni, a captain with an antiviolence group called Men United for a Better Philadelphia, was in the neighborhood yesterday.

"We're out here to stop the violence," Bucceroni said as he pressed pamphlets containing antiviolence information into the hands of residents.

Bucceroni, who said he was a former Guardian Angel in New York City, said the police need to do more.

"I'm pro-police," he said. "But they have to get out of their cars and walk. If the cops had the radio up and the heater on, they wouldn't have heard the gunshots."

Some residents said they felt the increased police presence and appreciated it.

"I was scared to walk to the Chinese restaurant," said Danielle Staten, 21, who was walking to the eatery in the 2600 block of Tasker with her 7-year-old nephew, Ahmir Ellis. "But now that the cops came I feel much better."

Still, when Bucceroni asked whether she would be interested in setting up a Neighborhood Watch group, Staten bristled.

"It's crazy out here," she said. "I don't want anybody after me."