Anthony Shawn Robinson did not appreciate losing to his father at chess.
His father, Anthony Rich, taught him the game, then beat him over and over. Eventually, the younger Anthony decided he had had enough.
“I’m not losing against you no more,” he told him.
Anthony put in the work to make that declaration stick. By middle school, he was good enough to compete in chess tournaments. The story captured the mix of determination and playfulness that his family knew well: He could take a game seriously, but what he enjoyed most was sharing it with someone he loved.
Anthony was 36 when he was killed by gun violence on Sept. 20, 2025. Besides his father, he was also the son of Lisa Robinsona brother to Tina Robinson, Tyra Robinson, Sarita Robinson, Grayson Smith and Meloni Smith.
He grew up in Germantown, where sharing a home with several siblings could turn even a few minutes on the family computer into an event that everyone will remember forever.
There was only one computer for four children, and this was back when using the internet meant tying up the telephone line. Anthony sometimes tried to make his younger twin sisters give up their turn. Their oldest sister, Sarita, took her job as their protector seriously—even if Anthony started something while she was getting out of the shower.
One day, Sarita heard a commotion at the computer and came charging out, naked, wielding a broom and ready to defend the twins. The episode became one of those family stories that only got funnier with time. Anthony never let her forget it.
“He would always talk about that,” Sarita said. “He was like, ‘You did not play about the twins.’”
The childhood squabbles did not last, but the laughter did. Anthony grew into a funny, highly social man who stayed active in the lives of an enormous extended family. Lisa had 18 grandchildren, with another on the way. Fifteen of them were boys, enough to basically have two football teams.
Anthony, a huge Eagles fan, especially No. 36 Brian Westbrook and No. 26 Saquon Barkley, and was happy to get a game started. He threw the ball around with his nephews and other boys in the family, played video games with the children and jumped uninvited into his nieces’ TikTok videos. Sarita said him only an “OK” dancer, but that never stopped him from joining in.
His humor helped put people at ease. If relatives started getting loud or acting as if they wanted to argue, Anthony would tease them for acting “tender.” More often than not, his joke broke the tension.
He also maintained friendships that stretched back to childhood. Relatives would discover that Anthony was still talking to people they had not heard from in years or checking in on family members he had not seen recently. He went to parties with cousins his age, kept up with old friends and made a point of finding out whether people were all right.
Anthony did not merely enjoy family gatherings, he made them happen. Every Friday, Saturday and Sunday, relatives from different households found their way back to one another. That closeness began with Lisa, who was adopted and was determined to keep her own children together. Anthony helped pass the tradition to the next generation.
At the center of Anthony’s life was his mother, Lisa. She helped make him the man he became, keeping him involved in church, teaching him to put school first and encouraging him whenever he needed direction. Anthony lived with her for 35 years, and when it was finally time to get a place of his own, he did not really want to leave.
“She was his life,” Sarita said. “She made him who he was.”
Moving out changed Anthony’s address, but it did not change their relationship. Lisa spoke with him every day and made sure he saw her so often that it almost felt as if they still lived together. Their bond was so close that some of his friends envied the love and care he received, Sarita said, so Anthony opened that relationship to them, too.
“He was very family-oriented,” Sarita said. “He was the one that brought everybody together because we all live in different households, but we would all come together every weekend—every Friday, Saturday and Sunday. He called us every day on video. He’d be like, ‘I’m outside.’ He would be at my dad’s house or my mom’s house, and we’d be like, ‘All right, we coming around.’”
During his final football season alive, he persuaded his father to carry a television outdoors and set it up against the side of the house so everyone could watch the game together. It was not something his father would normally have done, Sarita said, but Anthony had a knack for getting everyone to go along with his plans.
The gatherings feel different without him. His relatives still come together, but Sarita said Anthony’s presence made a difference. He was the family’s connector—the person who turned an ordinary weekend into a reason for everyone to show up.
Anthony attended Emlen Elementary School, Roosevelt Middle School and Germantown High School. Although he did not graduate from Germantown, he later earned his GED and was part of Youth Build, when he helped construct the building at 17 Westmoreland St. He also worked as a home health aide.
He was especially proud of his four children, Brooklyn Person, Nehemiah Person, Anthony Robinson Jr. and Keir Lee. Nothing made him happier than being with them. He took them to the playground, played video games with them and brought them around the family so they could grow up close to their cousins.
He also loved spending time with his girlfriend ofthree years, Brittany Thompson.
Video games were another serious matter for Anthony. He played with friends online and owned both an Xbox and a PlayStation 4, but the children knew the PlayStation was his. They could only use the Xbox.
Behind all the jokes was a generous man. Once Anthony had his own place, friends who needed somewhere to stay could sleep on his couch. They could shower, eat and make themselves comfortable. Before then, some had slept at Lisa’s home. Anthony did not simply share his belongings with his friends; Sarita said he shared his family with them, too.
“He didn’t want to see nobody suffering or nobody not have something that he had.” Sarita said. “He even shared his mother and his sisters with his friends because he knew what it was like to have family. He has so many friends that still check up on her today because he shared that motherly figure with them.”
That generosity made the circumstances of his death particularly difficult for his loved ones to accept. Anthony was at an auto shop, getting work done on a car with his father, when his life was taken.
Sarita said he did not live a street life and did not present himself as someone who did. When friends appeared headed in the wrong direction, Anthony tried to pull them toward something better, sometimes inviting them to come work with him and his father.
He’d always say, “You Darwin, bro. You gotta get yourself together if you’re gonna hang around me.”
His family is left trying to understand how someone who stayed away from the streets could nevertheless become a victim of them.
“God got him,” she said. “That’s his son, and he took him, and he was ready for him to come home.”
Most of all, the family remembers his smile. Sarita said Anthony smiled so naturally and so often that it was simply the way people expected to see him.
Even in the final moments people saw him, at the funeral, smiling.
“He smiled like that all the time,” Sarita said. “Even like in death when he was laying on the bed. He smiled so much they couldn’t close his mouth. It was one of those good memories we had, because you don’t see that at funerals.”
