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Friday night’s good times gave way to Saturday morning’s Market tension. Sim said he didn’t know Alliman but at the end of the birthday festivities, sideways glances led to words being exchanged.

“I tried to stop the situation and he shot me,” Sim said. Sim was shot in the stomach. The bullet went through his back. Blood was “shooting out of” him and his best friend Phillips took off after the gunman.

Sim wishes Phillips hadn’t chased Alliman — a decision that contributed to Phillip’s fatal end. But Sim figures Phillips thought Sim had been killed and that he was trying to stop a man he believed to be his friend’s killer. “That’s why he’s my boy,” Sim said.

Friends put pressure on Sim’s wounds and stayed with him until the ambulance arrived. When Sim found out that Phillips was dead, he was “broken” and “crushed.”

Phillips was a “family man and a loyal friend,” Sim said.

“’T’ would give you the shirt off his back,” Sim said. “I met him when I was 12. He taught me everything I know.”

They’d been friends for more than two decades.

“I love him and miss him every day.”

Sim thinks the violence that injured him and claimed his friend’s life was senseless. “It’s all bulls–t … for nothing.”

That the man responsible for the shootings was ultimately stopped and killed by police is no comfort to him.

“Nobody should die this way,” Sim said. “Everyone (is) affected. He has a family, too.”

Sim wants other young men who may think about resorting to violence to see the impact it has on so many people.