Baker was “cooler than a Cadillac with AC in hundred-degree weather,” his friend Kevin Spraggins Jr. said at his funeral. He had great taste in sweatshirts and gave “the best hugs,” according to his aunt Carlotta Baker.
That kindness was on full display on July 3 when Baker agreed to escort a woman to her car in downtown St. Louis. The pair were shot in an attempted carjacking. She survived multiple gunshot wounds to the lower body. Baker died at age 25. He was among 19 people shot and seven killed in the city over the July Fourth weekend.
At a service in Baker’s honor at Lighthouse Baptist Church, images flashed across the auditorium screen ahead of the ceremony. In one photo, Baker is a skinny kid with big ears. In another, he’s a grinning teenager in a #17 jersey at Christian Brothers College High School, where his team won the state championship in his senior year with a 14-0 record. In a video clip, he’s teaching his beloved niece De’Sanyi, now 5, how to brush her teeth. (“Don’t eat it,” he advises her on the video.)
Baker dreamed of playing in the NFL making enough money so that his mother wouldn’t have to work, his cousin Abryon Givens said at the service. But when he realized that wasn’t going to happen, he adjusted his focus. “One thing D-Bake told me was, if we stand-up men, that’s all our mama want,” Givens said.
Baker’s older brother Devon said that their mother called the two of them her “Double D’s.” At an early age, they’d decided that meant “dedication and determination.” The boys saw things through to the end, An’namarie said, “whether they liked it or not.”
An’namarie is pushing to find her son’s killer; police say they have no leads. She is determined to help stop the gun violence that has taken so many other children from so many other mothers. “Damion cannot just be some random number of homicide and we move on to the next number,” she said. “It’s gotta look different.”
“We gotta get to work,” she said.