They gathered at the site of their friend?s slaying to cry out for answers. “Why did it have to be him?” asked eighth-grader Maryum Shadeed, a friend of Zecariah Hallback, 18, who was shot to death during a robbery on Jan. 9 while waiting for a bus at East 33rd Street and The Alameda.

At about 8 p.m., Hallback had just left a meeting of the Algebra Project, a national mathematics literacy campaign aimed at helping poor students, and was standing at the bus stop with two friends. A man at the bus stop pulled out a gun and demanded their money and cell phones, police said.