So many envelopes were opened here in this Philadelphia living room. So many gasps accompanied what came out of them -- full scholarship offers from major colleges far and near. The promise of a future of football excitement and financial security arrived in these envelopes, all addressed to Omain Gullette.

Gullette was a Pennsylvania All-State defensive lineman and just-graduated student body vice president at Glen Mills reform school when he was shot and killed just down the street from here last June. Last week, Omain's mother Pamela Reynolds sat down in this living room to open one more envelope. Enclosed were autopsy photos of her only son.

"Are you sure you want to see these?" asked family members who demanded to see the pictures first. Reynolds said yes. "They wouldn't let me see him when he got killed," she says. "All I had seen was just him laying there (at the hospital). This was closure."

So Reynolds opened the envelope, and gasped. There was Omain's body, riddled with 13 bullet holes -- in his stomach, in his arm, near his armpit, in the back of his neck. Omain was shot not with a handgun, but with an AR-15 army rifle. His flesh was not pierced, but torn and shredded. "My first thought," Reynolds says, "was, 'How could they do this to my son?'"

Reynolds sometimes pulls out the photos when she is alone in the house -- when her twin daughters Diamond and Dominique are out with friends. She looks quickly at the bullets and the wounds, but always lingers on the last photo -- a picture of her son's left hand. This is the hand she held on so many winter afternoons, the hand that caught so many footballs, the hand that Omain used to wave hello and goodbye on so many school days. In this photo, Omain's hand is covered in blood. He spent his last few moments alive trying to somehow stop the bleeding. Reynolds thinks about those moments until the tears make her eyes too blurry to look anymore.

This month, Philadelphia police have made two arrests in Omain's shooting. Detectives are still pursuing another suspect. Part of why Reynolds insisted on seeing the autopsy photos was to prepare herself in case she had to testify at a trial.

Omain Gullette succumbed to temptations faced by millions of urban teens. He became a street heavy and a drug pusher on the meanest of Philly streets. By choosing to attend a reform school with a football program, Omain drowned those temptations in the dream of millions more kids -- to provide a working, single mother with a life of luxury. Instead, Pamela Reynolds knows what millions of mothers know -- the searing grief that comes with losing a son.

That grief will linger in this house long after this last envelope is thrown away. But so will Omain's energy, which his friend and former schoolmate Henry Atkinson feels as he carries the weight of his college decision deep into February. So will other envelopes, filed away according to school next to the living room television. And so will other pictures -- of Omain grinning in his Glen Mills graduation cap and tassle, of Omain making one of countless tackles, and of Omain as a little boy at play. That photo sits alone now in Omain's empty room, enclosed in a white frame that reads "I Love Mommy."

Eric Adelson is a staff writer for ESPN The Magazine. E-mail him at eric.adelson@espn3.com.