Handing out blankets tribute to friend who was fatally shot
By Josh Shaffer
The News & Observer
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — Every year on Christmas Eve, Brandon Anderson travels to Moore Square with his car’s trunk full of blankets — alms for the homeless poor around downtown Raleigh.
For the next few nights, he finds the cold and needy on sidewalks outside the bank towers on Fayetteville Street or in the woods off South Saunders Street, huddled in makeshift camps for the holidays. Sometimes, he meets whole families seeking warmth. Once, he met a former stockbroker who fell to pieces after losing his wife and child in a house fire.
Anderson hands them all blankets until his supply of donations runs out. In the past three years, he estimates helping about 1,500 people — a total he plans to increase.
“Anybody in the community, anybody in the struggle, anybody going through changes in their life,” Anderson said. “My grandmother told me I had a good heart.”
For Anderson, 32, running a one-man charity represents a sharp turnaround. At age 13 or 14, he joined a Bloods gang on the south side of Raleigh.
By age 20, he was charged with three counts of attempted murder for a 2008 shooting outside a house on Greywood Drive. He pleaded guilty to felony assault and served five years in prison, the first of three stints behind bars.
He speaks openly now about the lifestyle that sucked him in, calling himself a product of his gritty environment growing up. He recalls how older gang members would come to his football games, when he played linebacker for Broughton High School, and try to talk him out of the gang world.
“’You’re telling me not to sell drugs when I’m struggling and my family got nothing,’ “ he said, recalling long-ago conversations. “’You selling drugs and seems like you’ve got everything.’
Once I started selling drugs, I realized I didn’t have everything.”
Change came for Anderson around 2014, when he and lifelong friend James Alston were driving through downtown, noticing the haggard men on benches around the downtown park. Alston hit on the blanket idea, but it took a while to materialize because both he and Anderson returned to prison before they could start.
Then in 2015, Alston was shot and killed on Quarry Street in Southeast Raleigh while trying to organize a gang truce. For Anderson, handing out blankets remains a tribute to his friend, a sign of his Christian faith and a permanent shedding of his gang-related past.
“I used to be embarrassed by it,” he said. “I thought people looked at me like I’m just a gang member or a person who shot people. But it wasn’t me no more.”
Given his gang background, people sometimes doubt Anderson’s sincerity, said Linden Smith White, his mentor at Step Up Ministry, a Raleigh nonprofit that offers job training and life skills. But Anderson never missed a weekly meeting there, she said, even with transportation issues.
He works full-time as a sheet metal fabricator in Knightdale, supporting his wife and three children while running his blanket collection.
“I just see him continue to grow,” she said. “I love that about him. He’s not super wealthy, he works 8 to 5, and he is still finding a way to give. We can all find ways.”
Moore Square is different this year after a $13 million face lift. The homeless population has largely drifted to other streets.
But Anderson knows where to find them, and he’ll make a cold sidewalk a little warmer.
