DEL.ICIO.USMarietta mom desperate to know who killed her son
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Friday, August 29, 2008
Cordelia Gober has collected all the stuffed Teddy bears, cloth flowers and notes that friends have left on the Marietta street corner where her son was shot last month. She keeps them on a table in a corner of her townhouse.
Samuel “Dra” Steward, 16, was shot in the head by two young men on July 22 on Allgood Road and Avery Street. He died the next day.
Family photo
Samuel ‘Dra’ Steward, 16, is shown in a photo provided by his family. He was shot twice on Allgood Road and Avery Street in Marietta on July 22 following a fight with two young men. Steward died the following morning. The two suspects were last seen heading north on Fairground Street.
Police sketh
Marietta police released this sketch of one of the two suspects in the shooting of Samuel Steward.
The two men disappeared into the night in a dark SUV..
“The question is why? He wasn’t selling drugs. He didn’t have any money on him. So, I don’t understand why any of that happened,” Gober, 40, said recently.
And she wants to know who killed her son.
Marietta police have the same questions.
In the first few days after the murder, police received many tips. But since then, they have dwindled, said Detective Chris Lindsey.
“By now, I’m sure someone in the Atlanta area has heard one or both of these suspects discuss this incident,” Lindsey said. “We need that person or persons to contact us.”
There is a $5,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the killers.
The silence is frustrating for detectives, Lindsey said.
“Him being a young man, with so much ahead of him,” Lindsey said. “And no one has come forward.”
The teenager spent much of his early years on the road touring with a rap group, Small Change.
In 2006, Dra (pronounced Dray) came home to live, attending first Marietta High School and later Osborne.
Rap was still in his blood, and his mother remembers him sitting on the front steps of their home, recording the words on his cell phone.
He rapped at a fund-raiser in Atlanta for Hurricane Katrina victims shortly after the natural disaster hit the Gulf Coast, she said.
Rapping also got him into trouble at Osborne last year. He was suspended when a teacher caught him writing lyrics in his notebook just as class began, his mother said.
Gober has some of his raps on a CD he recorded shortly before he died. There are profanities on it. Mom gave her son some advice.
“If you are going to rap, you need to go into it without cursing,” she told him. “When you write, write from your heart. There are people out there who will hear what you have to say. … Just say what you feel and, I promise you, there are people out there that will listen.”
“‘Yes, ma’am,’” she remembers him answering.
Now that his voice has been silenced, Gober hopes that someone will come forward to help catch the men who killed him.
“I’m not understanding how we are not hearing anything,” Gober said.
In a YouTube video, one of the members of Small Change, P.J., calls Dra his brother.
“He is no longer with us on this earth. But, I mean, he is in a better place,” P.J. says. “I’m trying not to cry right now.”
The teenager offers a few words to get others through the grief:
“….Be thankful for what you have. Be thankful for the family. Be thankful for your parents. If your parents are doing the right thing, they’re doing the right thing. Just trust their lead.”
Dra’s friends have put up a slide show of photographs of the teen. Dozens of others have left short notes for the dead teenager on the web site.
Gober has heard different versions of what occurred at Allgood Road and Avery Street that night.
She’s pieced together what she thinks happened from conversations with the teenage friend who was with Dra and a witness:
Dra and his friend had been at a youth recreational center, just down the road on Montgomery Street.
Moments before the shooting, Dra was standing alone on at the intersection.
His friend walked toward him, two strangers followed. The two men stood on the opposite corner and asked the teens for a cigarette.
Words were exchanged. Gober is not sure what was said. The two men crossed the street and confronted the teens. There were more words. Then, a short fight.
A witness “saw Dra turn to walk away. And one of the guys hit him,” Gober said.
The teenager fell to the ground.
“That’s when he shot him, once he hit the ground….Once they started shooting, a truck drove up. They jumped in the back, and they went down the side street.”
Dra’s eyes were still open, a witness told Gober.
“You just shot my son. There’s no way you can hold that in. You gotta talk to somebody….And if they are talking to somebody, that means they are holding it, too. How can you hold [information] knowing that your best friend or your brother or your cousin or your uncle just shot a kid?”
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