Fort Worth police arrest 7 more suspects accused in Mother’s Day park shooting
Police have arrested an additional seven adult suspects in connection with a shooting that wounded five people at a Fort Worth park on Mother’s Day.
The seven new suspects each face a charge of engaging in organized crime, but some are facing multiple counts, court records show. Police previously arrested three other suspects — two accused of aggravated assault and one of making a terroristic threat — in connection with the shots that were fired into a crowd of hundreds at Village Creek Park.
Members of the community say multiple juveniles who were at the park also have been arrested. One grandmother told the Star-Telegram she never saw the no-knock warrant police referenced when they showed up at her door to arrest her grandson. The grandson and the grandmother aren’t named in this story because the Star-Telegram does not typically identify juvenile suspects.
“I tried to explain that my grandson, 15, is a budding mechanic,” the grandmother said. “Now you are trying to make him into a criminal because these older boys are paying him to work on their cars. I want them to really show me that this is justified.”
A flier has been posted on Instagram calling for a protest at 5 p.m. Friday at the Scott D. Moore Juvenile Justice Center on Kimbo Road with the hashtag #freeourboyz. The flier says police arrested more than 20 people between the ages of 13-22 in connection with the park shooting. No contact information was included on the poster.
Police have not confirmed if any juvenile suspects have been detained in connection with the Village Creek Park shooting.
All but two of the named suspects have bonded out of jail.
According to police, all five youths who were wounded at Village Creek Park in southeast Fort Worth on Mother’s Day are expected to recover. The police department’s gang unit was investigating what led to the shooting in the park on Wilbarger Street, where more than 400 people had gathered on the evening of May 10.
Court records show that those recently arrested include Daveon Harder, 19; Jamari Jennings, 17; Xzayvion Brown, 19; Curtis Goss, 22; Marcus Allen Hunter, 22; and Caleb Houston, 20, all of Fort Worth; and Avin Wilburn, 19, of Everman.
Suspects in this case who have been previously identified by police are Dcameron McKellar, 21, and Kristopher Robinzine, 26, who face charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, and Kieston Allen, 20, who is facing a charge of making a terroristic threat. The three were arrested in May.
About 10 minutes before volleys of rifle and handgun fire began, there was a warning of what was ahead, according to an arrest warrant affidavit for the first three suspects.
Kieston Allen saw a woman in the park and threatened her, according to her statement to a Fort Worth police detective described in the affidavit.
“On Blood, that’s the opp,” Allen reportedly said. “We about to air her out.”
She moved away after his threat, and was standing near a pickup truck when the shots rang. A woman who stood near her was among the five people who were shot.
The woman whom Allen allegedly threatened told a detective that she believed she was the shooter’s intended target.
Affidavits supporting the arrests of Allen, Robinzine and McKellar indicated the violence resulted from conflict among members of the Bloods street gang subset APE and members of Crips subset YTN.
Two of the victims were critically injured. One was shot in the neck, the other in the lower back. Three others were shot in their legs and were less seriously injured.
The investigation appears to have broken with police Real Time Crime Center surveillance video, which showed a man getting an AR-style rifle from a backpack and handing it to another man who fired it toward the park, according to the affidavits, written by Richard Fluitt, a gang unit detective.
Robinzine removed the rifle from a backpack and gave it to McKellar, who was the shooter, according to the affidavits.
This story includes information from Star-Telegram archives.
This story was originally published June 25, 2020 at 5:57 PM.
