If you grow up hard in the Edenwald Houses in the Bronx, like Manhattan junior forward Emmy Andujar did, sometimes decisions and their consequences get magnified. Surrounded by gangs and drugs and so much violence, a couple choices can be the difference between getting swallowed up and getting out. Andujar had to make a judgment call like that at the most emotional moment in his life and it might just have set his family on a path away from all that.
Andujar was attending class in April of 2012 when his little brother Franklin, then 11, called him crying. Between the sobs he kept saying “He’s gone!” Little Franklin was talking about their older brother Jose. He’d been shot in the head and found dead in the stairwell close by their 11th-floor apartment.
Police were outside the building when Emmy arrived, refusing to let people enter or exit because the shooter had not been apprehended. “I didn’t want to believe it was true but there were candles lit on the ground outside the door. That’s when it first started to get real,” Andujar said, his eyes beginning to tear up. “They took me to his body. It was on the ninth floor. I had to see it.”
The 6-6 former Rice High standout choked up and wiped his eyes. “I was sad, but I was also so angry,” he said softly.
Jaspers coach Steve Masiello arrived. Police at the scene offered to bring him upstairs but told him he’d be on his own if he decided to leave. “I’m a city guy. This isn’t the first project I ever walked into. But I’ve never walked into a situation like that,” he said. “Then there’s this kid who is like a son, heartbroken and holding this framed picture of his brother.”
Jose Andujar was 22. Though just 2½ years older, he’d been more father than brother to Emmy. They were toddlers when their father exited their lives, sent to prison and then deported to the Dominican Republic. Emmy said Jose felt he had to be the provider and dropped out of school when he was 14. His choice: what Andujar refers to simply as “the streets.”
“He never worked but he had other income. . . . He was providing for us but me and my mom worried all the time because we understood,” he said. “When he came home he always left the streets at the door.”
Through it all Juan Andujar kept on his brother – to stay in school to pursue the basketball path unfolding before him. He spoke of how special it is to get a scholarship, what it would mean to them all if he were the family’s first college graduate. Though his brother lived in turbulent waters, Andujar thought him his rudder.
The days after seeing his brother’s lifeless body were when Emmy Andujar had to make his choice. He was angry enough to want revenge and knew going to the streets might give him access to it. And his despair robbed him of his purpose.
Pearl Gabel/New York Daily News
Emmy Andujar says his family is getting through it and that he has plans for their future and basketball could play a big part.
“He could very easily have gotten wrapped up in this and done the wrong thing,” Masiello said. “Instead he chose to take care of his brother and his mother and himself and take the high road.”
“There was a hard decision. I’d seen that life all around me,” Andujar said. “Being in the streets is hard. They’re cold, hard people with nothing to live for. They look at themselves in the mirror and see someone who has nothing to lose. So people take their chances.”
He, however, had something to lose. When he stopped going to classes to be with his mother Migdalia, and Franklin, teammates such as junior RaShawn Stores begged him to return. And he had Jose’s vision for him; he didn’t want to quit on that.
So he turned away from the streets, back to college and basketball and the idea of graduating. “He’s gone but he’s helping me to get back now,” Andujar says.
“There’s a great lesson in this,” Masiello says. “He’s a model for doing the right thing, making the right decisions. If a 20-year-old kid can do it then we, as adults, should be able.”
Masiello said Andujar was sullen for the better part of a year until a moment in the late going of the Jaspers’ one-point win at Columbia last month. During a last-second huddle Andujar got vocal. “We’ve been doing this three years together,” he said. “Now no one can break us.”
It was the most emotional Masiello had seen Andujar since that night at Edenwald. It was all positive.
Andujar says his family is getting through it. They have a new outlook with a recent move to Highbridge Gardens. He has plans for their future and basketball could play a big part.
“I would like to get them out of the projects, that would be a start, and if I can make money playing basketball that becomes something real,” he says. “But I also want to graduate because that can be the way to get that, too.”
There’s hope, all because of one important decision.
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