This photo provided Friday, March 22, 2013 by Sherry West, of Brunswick, Ga., shows her son Antonio Santiago celebrating his first Christmas in December of 2012. West says a teenager trying to rob her at gunpoint Thursday asked "Do you want me to kill your baby?" before he fatally shot 13-month-old Antonio in the head. West was walking with Antonio in his stroller near their home in coastal Brunswick. The mother was shot in the leg and says another bullet grazed her ear. Police are combing school records and canvassing neighborhoods as they search for the gunman and a young accomplice a day after the slaying Thursday. (AP Photo/Courtesy of Sherry West)
This photo provided Friday, March 22, 2013 by Sherry West, of Brunswick, Ga., shows her son Antonio Santiago celebrating his first Christmas in December of 2012. West says a teenager trying to rob her at gunpoint Thursday asked "Do you want me to kill your baby?" before he fatally shot 13-month-old Antonio in the head. West was walking with Antonio in his stroller near their home in coastal Brunswick. The mother was shot in the leg and says another bullet grazed her ear. Police are combing school records and canvassing neighborhoods as they search for the gunman and a young accomplice a day after the slaying Thursday. (AP Photo/Courtesy of Sherry West)
This Friday, March 22, 2013 photo provided by the Glynn County Detention Center shows De'Marquise Elkins, 17, one of two teenagers arrested Friday and accused of fatally shooting a 13-month-old baby in the face and wounding his mother during their morning stroll in Brunswick, Ga. Elkins is charged as an adult with first-degree murder, along with a 14-year-old who was not identified because he is a juvenile, Police Chief Tobe Green said. (AP Photo/Courtesy of the Glynn County Detention Center)
Sherry West breaks down in tears as she describes the incident the day before where her 13-month-old son was fatally shot and she was wounded Friday, March 22, 2013 in Brunswick, Ga. West said Friday a teenager trying to rob her at gunpoint asked "Do you want me to kill your baby?" before he fatally shot her 13-month-old son in the head. (AP Photo/The Brunswick News, Bobby Haven)
Luis Santiago tries to comfort Sherry West at her apartment Friday, March 22, 2013, in Brunswick, Ga., the day after their 13-month-old son, Antonio Santiago, was shot and killed. West says she was walking her baby in his stroller when a teenage gunman demanding money shot the baby in the face and shot her in the leg. (AP Photo/Russ Bynum)
Authorities investigate the scene of shooting in Brunswick, Ga. on Thursday, March 21, 2013. A young boy opened fire on a woman pushing her baby in a stroller in a Georgia neighborhood, killing the 1-year-old boy and wounding the mother, police said. The woman, Sherry West, told WAWS-TV that two boys approached her and demanded money Thursday morning. Brunswick Police Chief Tobe Green said the boys are thought to be between 10 and 15 years old.(AP Photo/The Morning News, Terry Dickson)
BRUNSWICK, Ga. (AP) ? In five years, Sherry West has lost two sons to unspeakable violence.
The Georgia mother was grieving from Thursday's shooting death of her 13-month-old son in his stroller during an attempted robbery while they took a morning stroll. In 2008, her 18-year-old son was stabbed in an altercation in New Jersey.
A pair of teenagers was arrested Friday in the most recent shooting. West had just been to the post office a few blocks from her apartment Thursday morning and was pushing her son, Antonio, in his stroller while they walked past gnarled oak trees and blooming azaleas in the coastal city of Brunswick.
West said a tall, skinny teenager, accompanied by a smaller boy, asked her for money.
"He asked me for money and I said I didn't have it," she told The Associated Press on Friday from her apartment, which was scattered with her son's toys and movies.
"When you have a baby, you spend all your money on babies. They're expensive. And he kept asking and I just said 'I don't have it.' And he said, 'Do you want me to kill your baby?' And I said, 'No, don't kill my baby!'"
One of the teens fired four shots, grazing West's ear and striking her in the leg, before he walked around to the stroller and shot the baby in the face.
Seventeen-year-old De'Marquis Elkins is charged as an adult with first-degree murder, along with a 14-year-old who was not identified because he is a juvenile, Police Chief Tobe Green said. It wasn't immediately clear whether the boys had attorneys.
Police announced the arrest Friday afternoon after combing school records and canvassing neighborhoods searching for the pair. The chief said the motive of the "horrendous act" was still under investigation and the weapon had not been found.
"I feel glad that justice will be served," West said. "It's not something I'm going to live with very well. I'm just glad they caught him."
West said detectives showed her mugshots of about 24 young men. She pointed to one, saying he looked like the gunman.
"After I picked him, they said they had him in custody," West said. "It looked just like him. So I think we got our man."
West said she thought the other suspect looked much younger: "That little boy did not look 14."
The slaying happened around the corner from West's apartment in the city's Old Town historic district. It's a street lined with grand Victorian homes from the late 1800s. Most have been neatly restored by their owners. Others, with faded and flaking paint, have been divided into rental units like the apartment West shared with her son. The slain boy's father, Luis Santiago, lives in a house across the street.
A neighbor dropped off a fruit basket and then a hot pot of coffee Friday as a friend from the post office dropped by to comfort West.
Santiago came and went. At one point he scooped up an armload of his son's stuffed animals, saying he wanted to take them home with him. He talked about Antonio's first birthday on Feb. 5 and how they had tried different party hats on the boy.
"He's all right," Santiago told the boy's mother, trying to smile. "He's potty training upstairs in heaven."
West said her son was walking well on his own and eight of his teeth had come in. But she also mourned the milestones that will never come, like Antonio's first day at school.
"I'm always going to wonder what his first word would be," West said.
Beverly Anderson, whose husband owns the property where West has lived for several years, said she was stunned by the violence in what's generally known as a safe neighborhood where children walk to school and families are frequently outdoors.
Jonathan Mayes and his wife were out walking their dogs Friday, right past the crime scene, and said they've never felt nervous about being out after dark.
"What is so mind-numbing about this is we don't have this kind of stuff happen here," Mayes said.
It's not the mother's first loss of a child to violence. West said her 18-year-old son, Shaun Glassey, was killed in New Jersey in 2008. She still has a newspaper clipping from the time.
Glassey was killed with a steak knife in March 2008 during an attack involving several other teens on a dark street corner in Gloucester County, N.J., according to news reports from the time.
"He and some other boys were going to ambush a kid," Bernie Weisenfeld, a spokesman for the Gloucester County prosecutor's office, told the AP Friday.
Glassey was armed with a knife, but the 17-year-old target of the attack was able to get the knife away from him "and Glassey ended up on the wrong end of the knife," Weisenfeld recalled.
Prosecutors decided the 17-year-old would not be charged because they determined that he acted in self-defense.
Sabrina Elkins, the sister of the older suspect in the Georgia baby's slaying, said Friday evening that she believed her brother was innocent of the charges. She didn't know whether he had a lawyer.
"He couldn't have done that to a little baby," she told AP. "My brother has a good heart."
She said that her brother had been living in Atlanta, and only returned to Brunswick a few months ago. Typically, he would come by her house in the morning and they'd go to breakfast. But Friday morning, police came to her door as her brother was approaching along the sidewalk.
"The police came pointing a Taser at him, telling him to get on the ground," she recalled by phone. "He said, 'What are you getting me for? Can you tell me what I did?'"
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Associated Press Writer Christina A. Cassidy in Atlanta and news researcher Monika Mathur in New York contributed to this report.
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