By Jane Prendergast
The Cincinnati Enquirer

WEST END - The mother of the dead boy sat on a kitchen chair outside her West End apartment Tuesday afternoon, below the bar-covered windows. Doubled over, Javonna Williams wailed, head in hands.

Less than 24 hours before, a bullet killed her son, Javontay - ripped through his chest. Javontay was playing with other children in the basement of a Mount Airy apartment. The children found a loaded gun. They were playing with it, authorities said, when it discharged

Javontay was 7. The boy who shot him, police say, is 8.

The second-grader died Monday just before midnight, an hour after he was shot by his playmate. The other boy, who was not identified, will not be charged, police said.

Authorities are working to determine who was responsible for the gun that killed Javontay and several other guns officers found in the apartment.

The neighborhood buzzed with conversation about the shooting, as word spread that that the child killed on Hawaiian Terrace lived on Linn Street.

Javontay should've been in second grade, according to Cincinnati Public Schools.

They expected him to be back at Heberle Elementary when school started Aug. 21.

After he repeatedly failed to show up for school, a social worker knocked on his family's apartment door.

But the worker never located the family, said Principal Derryl King. The school did that for all its "no-shows,'' she said.

No other school requested Javontay's records, indicating he was not enrolled anywhere.

"That's the way it looks,'' the principal said. "Which is unfortunate.''

The boy's mother, 25, had intended to get him back in school, said a relative sitting with Williams outside the apartment. She just hadn't gotten around to it.

Williams declined to be interviewed.

E-mail jprendergast@enquirer.com