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Jonathan was just 3 when he saw his mother, her body riddled with bullets, in his playroom. But now his guardian Mattie Graham says, "It sends chills up my body just to talk about what heas become."

(John Munson/The Star-Ledger)

The memories have faded now from that horrible night when he was 3 years old, but the details Johnathan Aiken does remember are vivid. And he knows they’ll stay with him forever.

The commotion, the sirens and the screams, waking him in the middle of the night. The trip to his little playroom, where just hours earlier he had put his toys away into three large plastic bins.

The body of his mother, with seven bullet holes in her chest, lying in front of the door to the garage.

The trip to the police station, where a boy who had lost his mom to murder and, soon, his three older siblings to the system would begin a lifetime of asking one question: Why me?

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iken knows he should have become a statistic, that so many kids who start life the way he did in Dania Beach, Fla., would be in prison or worse, not preparing for another college football season at Rutgers.

He lost his mother, Ethel Edge, when her boyfriend gunned her down after an argument. He lost his grandmother, Helen Edge, who could no longer care for him due to her declining health.

He lost his three siblings, brother Joseph and sisters Ashley and Brittany, when he was placed in foster care. He spent part of his childhood in a group home with other kids who had no options.

“The first day of foster care, I had this social worker,” said Aiken, who has never met his biological father. “She took me to this place and gave me about $60. She said, ‘I’ll be back at lunch.’ It was 8 o’clock in the morning.”

The counselors at the group home asked him if he wanted breakfast. He said no. They asked if he wanted lunch. He said no. The social worker would be back, he told them, to take him away.

“I haven’t seen her to this day,” Aiken said. “To start off, it was the worst experience I’ve ever had.”

Aiken went into a shell. He was afraid to get close to anyone because they always disappeared when he did. He had no way to know that, from the grave, his mother was about to rescue him.

Before she died, before Aiken was even born, Ethel Edge made two of her best friends promise: If anything happens to me, get my youngest. Robert and Reginald Graham loved Ethel, a tough woman with a great sense of humor, so of course they couldn't say no.

But they knew they couldn’t do it alone. They needed help from Mattie Graham, their mother. Was she prepared to help raise another kid in her 60s? Graham didn’t hesitate. Get that boy, she told them.

So Johnathan Aiken had a new home in Fort Lauderdale, with two uncles who would look after him and a guardian in Mattie Graham who made sure he went to church and talked to a psychologist.

Still, the transition was not easy on Aiken. He acted out. He skipped school. He was 13 when Robert Graham confronted him about hanging with the wrong crowds around his school, when Aiken finally cracked.

“I never knew how much he saw (the night his mother was killed),” Robert Graham said. “One day, he was probably about 13, he just blurted it out. “I saw the whole thing! I walked over the body!’ I was shocked.”

Maybe unburdening himself about that night was the turning point. Maybe it was the move to a new school, Chaminade Madonna Prep, in nearby Hollywood, Fla. Or maybe it was his growing love for football.

Whatever it was, his new family saw a change in Aiken, one that only continued when he found a new family at Rutgers.

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iken, sitting at a table in the recruiting lounge at High Point Solutions Stadium, knows there was a time when he couldn’t talk about this. He was angry that he had to grow up without his family.

“From elementary to high school, it was, ‘Why me?’” he said. “Some kids used to tease me in high school for not having a mom when they did. I wanted to know, ‘Why me?’ I resented God. I felt like he owed me a mom for the longest time. I’m probably just getting over it and I’m 21.”

He eventually did reunite with his siblings. Mattie Graham would bring him to see his oldest sister, Ashley. Then, one day when he came home from a football camp, they brought him to a strange house and told him to ring the bell. A boy who looked just like him answered.

Johnathan Aiken breaks up a pass during the spring game. He'll see an increased role in the Rutgers secondary this year.

It was his brother, Joseph, who is now in the military. They stay close, talking and texting every day. Aiken eventually came to realize that he had a bigger family, and that now includes the people around him in Piscataway.

The sign on the practice field at Rutgers – “F.A.M.I.L.Y. – probably has a deeper meaning for Aiken than most of his teammates. The house where Mattie Graham and her sons raised him will always be home, but so is this place and the locker room he shares with 100 brothers.

“Looking back at what happened, it definitely motivated me and helped me to become a better person,” Aiken said. “If I hadn’t gone into foster care I would have never started playing football or found the people who influenced me. They put that positive into my life after everything went bad.

“It definitely made me who I am.”

Aiken will have an increased role in the revamped secondary at Rutgers this year and will continued to play extensively on special teams. The junior isn’t sure what he wants to do with his life after football, but he figures it’ll involve working with young people in some way.

He’ll tell the story of his childhood nightmare, rehashing the details of a horrible night that will never fade, and hope that they’ll see him and think, “if this kid made it, I can too.”