The parent who hosted the house party Bobby Tillman attended just before he died is speaking out.
Tracy Sanders said her daughters are still hurting from the results of the party they had the Saturday night the 18-year-old Tillman was beaten and stomped to death by a group of teens milling outside.
"They're having a hard time," Sanders said. "One minute, they're OK. And the next minute, they aren't."
Four teens were arrested and accused with felony murder: Quantez Devonta Mallory, 18, Horace Damon Coleman, 19, Emmanuel Benjamin Boykins, 18, and Tracen Lamar Franklin, 19.
Sanders, reached by phone, refused to talk about the events that lead up to the party swelling then abruptly ending.
Tillman was invited to the Nov. 6 party Sanders' daughters hosted as a reward for their good grades. When the festivities swelled beyond her anticipation, Sanders ended the party around 11:30 p.m. and sent everyone home, according to police reports.
Outside Sanders' Douglas County home, several fights started in a few groups of the crowd that witnesses described as up to 60 teens, some of them drinking alcohol in the street.
In one of those scuffles, witnesses told police a girl hit Boykins, who claimed he wouldn't retaliate by hitting a girl, but would instead hit the next male he saw and didn't know.
That male was Tillman.
Boykins told Channel 2 Action News that he and Tillman exchanged terse words before any fight started, but denied being responsible for Tillman's death.
"A lot of things that have been said just aren't true," Sanders told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
She refuted assertions that her teen daughters planned a party of that magnitude, or any others following the incident.
Instead, she said focus should be placed on helping the Tillman family and preventing this situation from happening again.
"At the end of the day, this woman lost her son, and that's what's most important," Sanders said. "That's not fair that this happened to her. I cry for her every night."
Her daughters went to school with Tillman, and Sanders said she wanted to be a source of support for his mother, Monique Rivarde.
"I give her my deepest sympathy," she said. "I'm here for her."
Sanders mentioned that Rivarde is beginning a campaign to stop teen violence, and agrees that there is a need for a change.
"This has to stop," Sanders said. "Martin Luther King, Jr. didn't give his life for us to continue this violence. What are we going to do from this point forward?"
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