Harlem author wrote about violence — then died from it

“A Betrayed Birth” a book by Adjowah Beverly. Beverly was shot and killed in Harlem on W. 123rd St. on Wednesday.

A convicted murderer who penned a book about a life of crime in Harlem was shot in the neck in a killing that mirrored the violence he tried to immortalize in his writing, police sources said Thursday.

Adjowah Beverly, 42, was shot in his W. 123rd St. pad around 8:30 p.m. Wednesday and stumbled outside to die, the sources and witnesses said.

Cops followed the splotches of blood along the street and on some cars to find two bags of white powder in his drug den along with signs that he was cooking crack, police sources said.

After serving 18 years in prison for killing a woman in a drug dispute, Beverly self-published a book in 2011 titled “A Betrayed Birth.”

The book is described on his website as “a realistic journey of sex, money, betrayal and murder that made the 80s Harlem’s most chilling era of the drug trade.”

The main character in the book, L.A., is a young man who’s father goes to prison for murder, leaving him in the hands of a “neglectful mother with a longing for notorious men and drugs.”

“With no other choice, L.A. answered the call of his streets by becoming a product of his environment,” the book blurb states.

Beverly was sent to the slammer in 1993 after pleading guilty to killing a woman in a drug dispute, law enforcement source said. He was slapped with 15 years to life and released in March 2013.

A 36-year-old woman who didn’t want to be identified said she saw Beverly “in the fetal position” at the corner of W. 123rd Street and Saint Nicholas Ave.

“There was blood all over his head. He wasn’t moving at all,” she said. “It was shocking to see it so close to home.”

There were no arrests as of Thursday evening.

Friends said they knew Beverly as “Archie,” that he drove a white Cadillac Escalade and came out of prison with the book ready to go. He published through a company he created called The Great 1S Publishing and sold it online as well as at at least one Harlem shop.

Beverly’s website says he was born in Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan in 1971, “raised in Harlem his entire life” and has two grown-children in college.

The sources said one bag of white powder was on the bed in his bloodied apartment and another was near the stove — a pot on the lit range had white residue inside.

with Rich Schapiro and Joseph Stepansky

Yahoo Local News – New York Daily News

http://newyork.greatlocalnews.info/?p=15019

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