News

Oct 04, 2023

Tahiem Weeks

The 22-year-old man who was shot last week by an FBI agent attempting to arrest him at his apartment in Philadelphia’s Nicetown-Tioga neighborhood has died, his family said Monday, as surveillance

The 22-year-old man who was shot last week by an FBI agent attempting to arrest him at his apartment in Philadelphia’s Nicetown-Tioga neighborhood has died, his family said Monday, as surveillance video and court records began to fill in details on the events that led to his shooting.

Tahiem Weeks-Cook was shot four times during the incident Friday on the 1700 block of West Venango Street. He died Sunday evening at Temple University Hospital, said his mother, Stacey Weeks.

Since then, authorities have released scant details on the circumstances, and Weeks said she’s struggled to obtain any information about why agents were trying to arrest him.

“I know it won’t bring my child back, but I need answers,” she said in an interview Monday. “They haven’t even contacted me with condolences or anything, and they killed my son.”

Officials said last week that Weeks-Cook was shot as agents attempted to serve arrest and search warrants at his apartment. Yet they have declined to provide a full narrative of the incident or identify the agent who fired the shots.

That silence continued Monday as FBI agents, reporters, and investigators working for a lawyer hired by Weeks-Cook’s family returned to the Tioga neighborhood in search of witnesses or security footage from neighboring buildings that might provide answers.

A video captured by cameras at a nearby business depicted the moments before the shooting just after noon Friday.

In it, Weeks-Cook can be seen leaving his apartment on the 1600 block of Venango Street as four armed agents in military-style camouflage tactical gear leap out of the back of an unmarked white van. He spots them and takes off running toward 17th Street as they pursue.

The video does not show the agents shooting Weeks-Cook. But less than a minute after he and the agents run off screen, another law enforcement officer gets out of the white van, shuts the back door and speeds off in the direction of the chase.

Weeks-Cook does not appear to be holding a weapon in his hands in the footage.

Authorities have not said he was armed at the time he was shot — a fact that has prompted more questions from Weeks and her family’s lawyer.

“I feel like they used unnecessary force,” she said. “But they won’t talk to me, and they won’t tell me anything. I don’t even know why.”

Officials have also declined to say why they were trying to arrest Weeks-Cook in the first place.

But sources familiar with the investigation said Monday that the FBI was investigating him in connection with a string of recent armed robberies of 7-Eleven stores across the region.

On the same day he was shot, Upper Southampton Township police filed felony charges against him — including counts of robbery, conspiracy and making terroristic threats — for a July 30 stickup at a 7-Eleven at 932 State Road, according to court records.

The affidavit of probable cause for Weeks-Cook’s arrest in that case indicates that the FBI and local authorities linked him to that crime by tracing cell phone location data from the location of the robbery in Bucks County to the apartment on the 1600 block of West Venango Street in North Philadelphia.

Reached Monday at the apartment, Weeks-Cook’s girlfriend, Trezjure Fielding, declined to comment except to say she was “devastated” by his loss.

Last week, the FBI offered a reward for any information related to the individuals behind the Upper Southampton robbery and said they believed it to be linked to at least seven other 7-Eleven stickups in Philadelphia, Delaware, and Montgomery Counties.

Each of those attacks involved two to three suspects — one of whom would wait by the door, while the others, dressed in black with their faces covered in masks and sunglasses, would confront the store’s clerk, brandish a gun and eventually make off with the contents of the store’s cash register.

But as Weeks mourned her son’s death Monday, she said none of that had been explained to her.

She spent the weekend by his bedside as doctors struggled to treat the gunshot wounds she said he sustained to his stomach, chest and groin. On Saturday, a surgeon had to amputate her son’s leg.

Her every attempt to talk with investigators who also lingered in the hospital over the weekend was rebuffed, she said.

Her family attorney, Paul Hetznecker, said: “I hope that we are able in an expedited fashion to get some answers for the family, rather than a long, drawn-out process that will only increase the pain and anxiety that they’re already dealing with.”

For her part, Weeks said she’s determined to fulfill the last promise she made her son.

“I whispered in my child’s ear yesterday,” she said, “‘I’m going to get justice.’”