1 year after son’s shooting death, mother vows grassroots effort ‘going into communities’
By Kimberly King
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ASHEVILLE, North Carolina (WLOS) — Local mother Teresa Mosely, 56, feels the sting of loss this Memorial Day and every Memorial Day going forward.
“My son was sitting in his car,” said Mosely on Monday, as she began to hang balloons at the Malvern Hills Park picnic area. “I was on the phone with him.”
Mosely said her son’s older cousin was approaching him that fateful day and her son told her he didn’t know what he wanted.
“That was 3:32, my son got shot at 3:33,” Moseley said, recalling the events of May 29, 2022.
Mosely, a nurse at Mission Hospital, was in Virginia Beach on vacation. She learned within moments her son had been shot multiple times. She said he was barely able to speak to her, as if to say goodbye before he passed away from his injuries.
“I cry every day. I know nothing’s ever going to bring my son back,” she said.
But to honor him and his life, Mosely has set out on a new mission with a purpose.
“I started a nonprofit, and it’s called the Keith Mosely Foundation,” she said.
The mother of six said Keith was her youngest. Her son was home from Barton College last year, where was getting his degree in sports management. He had previously been a starting football player at Asheville High School. His smile radiates from photos his mother keeps on her cell phone, and everyone in her family knows Teresa is working to make sure her son’s legacy and life live on through the work she has now set out to do.
“We’re going to go into the communities,” she explained. “We’re going to reach at-risk kids and families.”
Mosely wants to do a grassroots intervention, by meeting and connecting on a deeper level with Black families in all parts of Asheville and to speak with children and their parents. Her goal is to decrease gun violence, gunshots and murders. Her dream to do this dovetails with a grassroots door-to-door intervention program that, for several years now, Asheville Police Chief David Zack has been trying to get off the ground. Zack wants to model the program after a successful program at the Buffalo, New York, police department.
“I want to partner with anybody that can get this stopped,” said Mosely.
On Tuesday, May 30, she said she will be in Superior Court where Kevion Edgerton, the man charged with murdering her son, may appear for a court hearing. Mosely said Edgerton was her son’s cousin. She said there were no texts or evidence she’s aware of that show her son was having any issue or argument with Edgerton.
Still, she knows the alleged crime with which Edgerton is charged has changed her life and has broken her heart.
“He had a beautiful smile, he was kind to everyone,” said Tonya Cunningham, Teresa’s sister, of Keith. “My nephew loved everybody.”
Cunningham is working with her sister to launch the nonprofit. The spirit of the charity with outreach will also honor the memory of Teresa’s late husband, Keith Mosely Sr., after whom her son was named.
“My son’s nickname was ‘Deuce,’ for the second. People need to see our faces, the faces of a grieving mom, and learn from our pain. We want to remember him not as the young man that was laying in the street but for the young man he was and could have been.”
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