The Lower East Side teenager who was shot on Friday by someone reportedly trying to steal his Marmot parka posted the words “I’m dead” to Facebook hours before he died, and told a friend he was with to go home. Raphael Ward, 16, “refused to hand over his trendy Marmot winter parka to a gang of thugs” on Friday night, the New York Post reported on Sunday. That story reports that a gunman in a ski mask shot Ward “just minutes after the altercation over the jacket,” but it says Ward had made his “inexplicable” Facebook post hours earlier. The time element in the Daily News’s report is also vague: “Sources say the gunman and his crew reportedly approached Ward earlier in the evening and eyed his outerwear” before returning, armed, “a short time later.” Ward’s friend told the Post that she had just met Ward before he died. “Although he didn’t tell her what was wrong, he warned her: ‘Go home!’ ‘He knew they were coming back,’ she said.”
