The gunman stole $7, a pack of cigarettes and a pay-as-you-go cell phone.

Then, police said, he shot Kenly Oscar Wheeler in the chest outside East Baltimore's Dr. Bernard Harris Sr. Elementary School.

It was the phone that was the suspect's undoing: Detectives said he used it to call his girlfriend, and police quickly traced the call to her house on Braddish Avenue. The day after Wheeler was gunned down in the March 3 robbery, police had a suspect in custody, and he's 14 years old.

Kwauntre Javar Crudup is the youngest person charged with murder in Baltimore this year. He remained in juvenile lockup for two weeks on an unrelated burglary charge as police built their case. On Thursday night, he was charged as an adult.

In addition to first-degree murder, Crudup also faces charges of armed robbery, assault and using a handgun in the commission of a violent crime. He was ordered held without bail in a juvenile holding center designed for youngsters charged with adult offenses.

His arrest came just days after a 16-year-old was charged in a Baltimore killing. Last year, boys ages 14, 15 and 16 were arrested on murder charges.

Little could be learned of Crudup on Friday, as most records that detail his life are sealed because of his age. That includes where he went to school and any encounters with law enforcement.

The address listed on the police report of the arrest is a boarded-uprowhouse next to a corner grocery on McCulloh Street. No one answered the door at another rowhouse where a relative is believed to live, near Johns Hopkins Hospital in East Baltimore.

A juvenile police report obtained by The Baltimore Sun said that a school officer arrested Crudup on Nov. 22 after seeing a youth climb out a classroom window of Dr. Bernard Harris Sr. Elementary School on North Caroline Street. Wheeler's body was found outside the same school less than four months later.

The report says the officer chased the teen, tackled him and retrieved a $500 ThinkPad computer taken from a classroom. It was this burglary case that allowed police to hold Crudup while they continued investigating Wheeler's death.

The victim's mother, Jeri Dickerson, said her 29-year-old son lived with her on East Lafayette Avenue, near Broadway, and that he walked by the Bernard Harris school nearly every day on his way to and from work as a prep cook for Aramark. A company spokeswoman said he had been assigned to a downtown office building whose tenant is Monumental Life Insurance Co.

Wheeler had a tough start to life, with a string of arrests involving drugs and trespassing.

He had no record of violent offenses; his most serious case came in 2001, when the graduate of Fairmount-Harford High School pleaded guilty to selling drugs and was sentenced to two years in prison. He had not been arrested in the past eight years.

Dickerson said her son turned his life around, taking jobs in a warehouse, as a telemarketer, at Walmart and most recently for Aramark.

"My son was a good kid," Dickerson said. "He finished high school. He had struggling times, but he became a straight man and went out into the working world.

"Every job he had, he never missed a day and he never was late," his mother said. "He was always on the way to work early."

Dickerson said that because they lived in a drug-infested and dangerous neighborhood, her son usually took a different route to and from work every day. But Bernard Harris Elementary, just three blocks from Dickerson's rowhouse, was hard to avoid.

Wheeler was on his way to work, his mother said, when he was attacked at the school. Dickerson said she believes he was shot in a struggle with the gunman. "I taught him to stand up for himself," she said.

Dickerson said that what the killer didn't know was that her son had on two pairs of pants, and his wallet containing $300 was stuffed in the back pocket of the inner pair. The gunman got just the $7 in the pocket of the outer pair, along with the cigarettes and the cell phone.

Police searching Wheeler's body found his ID card and went to Dickerson's house. There, she asked if they had found his cell phone.

They had not, the detectives told her, and they asked her to keep paying the $10 pay-as-you-go plan so that they could trace any numbers called.

But they said they traced calls more quickly than they had expected. Police said the suspect called friends, cousins and his girlfriend, and that he was at her house when detectives showed up. "The suspect did not admit to shooting the victim, only to robbing him," Detective Albert Marcus of the homicide unit wrote in charging documents filed in court.

Police said Wheeler had been shot once in the chest and that his body was left for hours between a school walkway and a basketball court. A passer-by found the body about 8 a.m. March 3. While police said the shooter took the man's money and phone, that person left behind a gun and a ski mask. Police found those items under Wheeler's body but would not comment on whether it was the weapon used in the shooting.

And now Wheeler's mother, a custodian with Baltimore City schools for the past 22 years, and who has two daughters off in college, is alone on Lafayette Avenue. Her son struggled and overcame his addictions on dangerous streets, only to get killed for pocket change while on the way to work.

"We kept to ourselves," Dickerson said, pausing, and then adding, "We had a very good life here."