More than 300 people gathered Wednesday evening to remember three Conyers teens.
The slain trio has come to symbolize, alternately, the dangers of unmoored youth and the prudence of keeping guns around the house for protection.
The violent deaths of Isaiah Reed, Jaime Hernandez and Brandon Gresham, ages 15 and 16, became national news because, armed and wearing masks, they were killed while trying to rob a resident outside his home at 4 a.m., according to police. The shooting remains under investigation. But it appears to be a dramatic case of self-defense, possibly with an AR-15.
In short, an alleged robbing crew picked the wrong man to mess with, according to Brian Jenkins, who said he tried to comfort one of the teens as he was dying on his lawn.
“They ran into the worst scenario they could have imagined: a man with heavier firepower, a man who knew what he was doing,” Jenkins said.
He spoke with his neighbor, the shooter — a 46-year-old truck driver who lives with his mother and is “extremely fragile, having killed three young men.”
Another neighbor who lives in the cul-de-sac said of the shooter, “He cried the whole night, especially when he found out they were teenagers.”
That neighbor, like Jenkins, found a dead or dying teen on his property. He asked that his name not be used because there are rumors about retaliation against the homeowner.
“But how can you retaliate if they came over here to rob?” he asked. “He didn’t have a choice.”
The Rockdale County Sheriff’s Office has been tight-lipped about it all, releasing a blacked-out report, one with a sparse narrative that said a cop responded to a shots-fired call and found two grievously wounded teens in or near the cul-de-sac. The third ran about a block before collapsing on Jenkins’ lawn.
Jenkins said his neighbor came home about 4 a.m. Monday with his girlfriend and a nephew “and saw a young man standing near his home. He found that to be suspicious.”
Jenkins has gone hunting with the man before and knows he owns an AR-15-type weapon. It remains unclear whether the man had his rifle on hand that morning or somehow quickly retrieved it.
Several neighbors recounted hearing a bap-bap-bap of gunfire, perhaps eight shots, and then a considerably louder Blam-Blam-Blam! In all, according to neighbors, perhaps 20 shots were fired. They said the man with the rifle crouched behind a vehicle in his driveway before returning fire.
On Wednesday, a car with a disabled-person license plate and several bullet holes sat in that driveway. Neighbors said at least one more teen survived the incident. The Sheriff's Office asked for the public's help Thursday in identifying two others who may have been involved.
Jenkins, who is running for Rockdale County Commission chairman, met Wednesday with two mothers and a grandmother of the dead teens. “I feel in a small way a little connection because their child’s last words were muttered in my direction.”
The teen said, “I’m dying.”
“There’s a major void in the lives of these young men, an absence of positive influences in their surroundings,” Jenkins said. “They act out on what they see in other people. Unless we can infiltrate that paradigm with a positive, vibrant outlook, then there’s no recourse for them.”
Jenkins said the family showed him a video of two of the teens singing. They were talented, he said. And that made him sad.
“I don’t want to talk about their misdeeds, that’s obvious,” he said when asked about the allegations of attempted robbery. “I don’t want to say they met the death they deserved.”
The neighbor on the cul-de-sac echoed Jenkins, saying, “They need role models. I mean, we did stuff (while young), but we didn’t bother people working 9-to-5. The whole neighborhood was your family; they looked out for you. Now they come home, cuss their moms and slam their door.”
The vigil for the teens took place one subdivision over from where the shooting occurred amid a collection of low-income apartments. The vigil brought religious speakers, two school officials, lots of balloons, and some fond remembrances of the students who were “well liked” at Salem High School.
No one, however, spoke about the 4 a.m. robbery attempt that got them killed. Perhaps it was too soon, too raw. Or maybe it was just ignoring the elephant in the gathering.
One of the speakers was Betty Maddox, a former DeKalb County crime scene tech whose son was killed by a teen in 1993. She founded the group called Grieving Relatives shortly after the killing to somehow make sense of the senseless.
Twenty-six years ago, she told the AJC, “The violence is so bad, and people don’t know how bad it is. We’ve got to do something about it before we’re all dead.”
Is she swimming against a current? It seems that way. Just a few days ago, I wrote about a 14-year-old armed robber who laughingly bragged about his crimes in a video. And two teens in Cobb County were recently accused of using an AR-15 in a carjacking.
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But, actually, amid all the hand-wringing and dire predictions, juvenile crime hit its peak in 1996, with nearly 2.7 million arrests by law enforcement agencies in the U.S.
In 2017, there were 810,000 such arrests, a drop of 70%. That’s right, seventy percent!
Doesn't feel right. But those are the figures.
Steven Teske, chief juvenile judge in Clayton County, told me many courts have gotten better at jailing "those who scare us, rather than those who make us mad," and also finding intervention for the latter group. Juvie arrests for felonies are down 64 percent in Clayton County since 2008.
“Here, you have three kids who are dead. They’re dead because they put guns in their hands,” he said. “The bigger question is, ‘Why did they do that?’ We won’t stop it until a community is honest with who they are and what is wrong.”
He said building relationships with poor communities is key. “The burden is on us to reach out, because these folks don’t trust us. They’re not going to reach out.”
There was talk at the vigil about such reaching out. And while it’s too late for the three in question, maybe it will save some kids who are now 10 years old.
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