NEW ORLEANS — Valerie Walker sat on her front porch in the Treme neighborhood, clutching her son’s graduation picture.
“This is what I look at every night, now, I just look at that.” she said.
She had a remarkable relationship with her son.
“Anthony and I were very close. We didn’t just tolerate each other the way some parents and their children do. We were Frick and Frack. We were a team. We did everything together.”
Friday, her son, 18-year-old Anthony Clawson and a group of friends made their way into the Old Market Street Power Plant in the Lower Garden District and climbed to the roof.
“They went up to watch the sunset, sort of a last hurrah before they all went off to college,” Walker said.
She says on their way back down, something went very wrong.
“Anthony was in front of his friend, I guess sort of a girlfriend. He was testing the platform and he said 'it’s good.' She said 'no, I’m going to go around this way' and the platform he was on collapsed.”
Clawson fell 50 feet.
He died a day later from his injuries.
“It’s sort of a freak accident. He was this close to getting out of there.”
Walker didn’t know her son was going to the power plant that night.
But she said she had an inexplicable premonition something bad was going to happen.
“I never dreamed it would have been something so personal and horrific and tragic as losing my son in such an unfathomable way, to plunge to his death. He was poised for a brilliant life in every way," Walker said.
Clawson graduated from Ben Franklin High School and was headed to LSU on a full scholarship to study chemistry.
“He wished to use his skills, whatever they might have wound up being, Chemistry is a broad field, to help humanity,” his mother said.
Walker said her son spent the summer working at Antoine’s Restaurant.
“I went to see him at his last shift which was Monday a week ago. He had developed this sort of sneaky elegance and gracefulness and unobtrusively moving around as this busboy.”
Walker is now calling for New Orleans leaders to demand large, blighted properties be secured.
“Another sign of the lack of care of the city, of multiple administrations to do something about blight.
She said she would have gladly given her life for his, in a heartbeat.
“He was a shooting star. He was going to become a remarkable, remarkable man and that’s the real tragedy.”
Walker said she still hasn’t heard from the NOPD or the Orleans Parish Coroner’s Office.
She’s now warning young people to stay away from blighted buildings.