The gangly 13-year-old had accompanied “Toxxxin” into the woods on the sticky July 4 afternoon to buy a couple of cigarettes, police say.
Toxxxin, whose real name is Troy Westberry, emerged from those woods about an hour later, alone, sporting a bloody scratch on his arm.
“Want to ride bikes?” Westberry, 16, inquired of a younger boy from the same central DeKalb County neighborhood. When asked by the boy, who authorities aren’t identifying, what had happened to the other teen seen following him into the woods, Westberry didn’t hesitate.
“He’s in the woods, bleeding,” he told the boy, according to court testimony.
“His eyes are wide open. I just killed him.”
The killing of a teen is, tragically, not unusual. But Marquis Overstreet’s death was particularly brutal. What could’ve driven someone to stab a 13-year-old 23 times and shoot him twice? Police aren’t talking, but those who know the accused teenager say he was increasingly troubled and often entertained malevolent fantasies. Westberry, through his attorney, said he acted in self-defense.
“Another young black boy found dead,” wrote Miller Grove Middle School teacher Roger Poole in a letter sent to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution days after Overstreet’s body was discovered in a dry creek bed off Biffle Downs Road in unincorporated Stone Mountain. “No headlines, no NAACP rallies, no community outrage.”
And no easy answers.
Neither the victim or his accused killer were strangers to trouble. Overstreet and Westberry each had criminal records. Both attended DeKalb Alternative School, sent there after being expelled from their home schools. Neither lived with their birth fathers.
But there were differences.
Though Overstreet, outgoing and playful, seemed to embrace the thug life, getting a pair of tattoos and lying to friends that his father was rapper Lil Wayne, his fate had not yet been cast, say those who knew him.
Westberry, more sullen, seemed lost in darkness, teachers said. His interests, according to his Facebook page? “Death, murder, sex, drugs, torture, sluts, hatred, cadavers, maggots, disection (sic), your girl, your Moms, your Death.”
“Troy was already gone,” said “Preacher” Bennie Foster, who works with troubled kids in metro Atlanta. Westberry was enrolled in an anger management class Foster taught last school year at DeKalb Alternative. “He kept alluding to murder, to Satanic stuff, to perversion.”
Overstreet “was a bright young man,” said Foster, who was mentoring the 13-year-old. “He was getting better.”
But he was still defiant — “scared of no one,” said his mother, Keisha Langhorne.
“I’d tell him, Marquis, there’s always someone bigger and badder than you out there,” Langhorne, 39, said.
She last saw him June 23. He had run away from home after his mother wouldn’t allow him to visit his girlfriend.
On July 10, police arrested and charged Westberry with felony murder in Overstreet’s death. He will be tried as an adult.
‘Something bad is about to happen’
Just a few weeks before Overstreet died, he had marveled at the sight of a gaggle of geese settling in the front yard of his family’s Stone Mountain home.
“It was strange,” his mother recalled. “We had never seen that before in all the years we lived here.”
When the geese returned, the teen was shaken.
“Something bad is about to happen,” he told his mother.
Langhorne said she finds herself parsing many of her son’s statements now that he’s gone. Perhaps he really did see death knocking. Maybe he was into something he shouldn’t have been.
There was some hope, at least. Though Overstreet was a challenge, his potential enticed would-be saviors.
“He was a leader but he didn’t lead the way he should,” said Roger Poole, who taught Overstreet at Miller Grove Middle School.
In tandem with Langhorne, the language arts instructor worked overtime to reach the sixth-grader, even transferring him into a class with high achievers. Overstreet was capable of doing the work, but often wouldn’t, his teacher said.
“He could not see that the streets and gang activity had no place in the life for a black young man who aspired to become a productive citizen,” Poole said. “He could not see that the teachers around him cared about him as a person and as a young black man. He could not see that his mother was doing all she could to move him forward and keep him out of harm’s way.”
Efforts to get him involved in extracurricular activities were also futile. Despite being one of the taller kids in his class, Overstreet didn’t want to play basketball.
“That was his father’s sport,” Langhorne said.
Overstreet spoke of his dad often, telling Poole his father didn’t love him.
“I want you to care about you,” his teacher responded. Overstreet broke down in tears. It was the only time Poole saw the boy cry.
“He loved his father,” Langhorne said. “He just wanted more.”
The first time Foster met Overstreet, the 13-year-old refused to get out of his mother’s car. Langhorne had heard about Foster’s work with troubled kids and insisted her son enlist in the former public school teacher’s “boot camp” this past spring. She was determined to get tough.
A few weeks earlier, Overstreet was sent to a group home after a fight over cellphone usage led him to punch his mother in the face, violating probation for a marijuana offense.
“I wasn’t going to give up on him,” Langhorne said.
Foster said they began letting down his guard and, until his death, he was becoming increasingly active in the preacher’s after-school program.
“This was a kid who had made some mistakes, big mistakes, and he had a lot to learn,” Foster said. “But I saw something there. When you work with kids, you just know. From that first time I met him to the last, I could definitely see a change.”
Westberry, whose family members did not respond to requests for comment, was a different story.
Son of a killer
Troy Westberry was 5 when his father was sentenced to 60 years in a Connecticut prison for fatally shooting a man as he slept inside his car in Hartford. The victim, Anthony Benefield Jr., had just celebrated his 24th birthday.
According to a 2006 story in the Hartford Courant, Westberry’s father was making the best of his time in prison, participating in a “high-tech rehabilitation” program. Inmates are taught computer skills, learning how to repair old computers that are then donated to the needy.
“I have to show my kids that, even though I’m in jail, I’m still learning,” Westberry told the paper. “That is the kind of example I want to set.”
Reggie Hatchett, a friend of Westberry’s father growing up and now athletic director for the Hartford Boys and Girls Club, recently reached out to the namesake via Facebook.
“He [Westberry Jr.] seemed to be more of an introvert,” said Hatchett, recalling the elder Westberry’s prowess on the basketball court. “He told me he didn’t play sports, didn’t play basketball.”
“He didn’t seem to have much in common with his father,” he said.
Foster taught an anger management class in the alternative school that Westberry attended. During that class, Foster asked the 16-year-old, who was sent to the school because he stabbed another student with a pencil, what he would’ve changed to avoid the trouble that landed him in the program.
“I would’ve ripped off his head and stuck pencils in his eyes,” was the teen’s response, according to the instructor.
Dark reputation
Westberry was known for his goth persona. Classmates would egg him on, Foster told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, knowing he recognized few boundaries. Another DeKalb Alternative teacher told him of a story Westberry had written once about having sex with a corpse.
Music provided an outlet for his rage. Westberry boasted his songs were “the most brutal and bloody music you’ll ever hear before you die.” He was a prolific writer, with tunes like “Demonic Warfare” and “Raped by Zombies.” He even sold T-shirts featuring his name with lurid illustrations.
When Foster first read the name of Overstreet’s alleged killer, he didn’t make the connection.
Then, on July 26, at Westberry’s probable cause hearing, Foster came face-to-face with his former charge.
“I saw him and I remembered,” he said. “That was Toxxxin.”
Westberry, catching the glance of his former teacher, responded with a wink and a smile, Foster said.
Langhorne had dreaded that hearing, knowing she would be in the same room with her son’s alleged killer.
“I didn’t see what I thought I was going to see,” she said. “I didn’t see evil. I saw a kid who needed help.”
Police searching the teen’s room said they found a mummified rodent under his bed, DeKalb County Police Det. Bruce Brueggeman testified at the hearing. The teen was arrested after police located two knives and a gun hidden inside a guitar case, along with a watch and bracelet belonging to Overstreet.
Investigators zeroed in on Westberry after the younger boy to whom he had allegedly confessed came forward. The boy did so reluctantly, at his grandmother’s prodding. Her grandson remains “scared to death” of Westberry, she said.
Westberry told police he had offered to sell Overstreet cigarettes and the two walked into the woods to complete the transaction. That’s when Overstreet pulled a gun, according to Westberry, who said he wrestled it away before exacting his revenge.
The results of ballistics tests that might corroborate Westberry’s story have not been released.
“Our defense is self-defense,” said Westberry’s attorney, Gina Bernard, at the hearing. She has declined further comment.
Langhorne, meanwhile, plans to continue talking about her son’s death, hoping to keep other youths from following in his footsteps.
If only there had been more time, she said, her son would’ve overcome his demons. She produces a journal he kept last fall while incarcerated at the DeKalb Youth Detention Center on the charge of marijuana possession with intent to distribute.
“I want to marry [my 13-year-old girlfriend] someday,” he wrote. “When I go home I will be more respectful to my mother. I love her.
“I have faith and believe in God [that] on the 15th of November 2010 I’m going home to be with my family, future wife and do the right thing.”
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How we got the story
The circumstances were alarming enough. A 13-year-old runaway, stabbed 23 times and shot by a 16-year-old. How did the victim and his alleged killer get here?
The AJC spoke with family members, teachers and others who knew the two youths. Both had their troubles, but the deeper we dug we learned the victim was trying to mend his ways. He had vast potential and a mother who wasn’t going to give up on him.
His alleged killer, meanwhile, seemingly was lost and had become something of an outcast, losing himself in a depraved fantasy world. But still, just a kid. As the victim’s mother told the AJC of seeing her son’s accused killer for the first time, “I didn’t see evil. I saw a kid who needed help.”
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