Group wants teens they say were wrongly arrested in Fort Worth gang shooting released
Relatives said that at least three teens, but maybe four Black children were being wrongfully detained inside the Tarrant County Juvenile Detention Center, where protesters screamed outside on Friday. “Free our boys!” the crowd of about 100 people chanted.
One father said his 15-year-old son was an honor student, and a budding mechanic who worked with his grandfather, and he was being accused in a gang-related shooting on Mother’s Day in which he had no involvement.
The 15-year-old had been inside the detention center for more than 10 days, his grandmother said. The teen is ill and needs to maintain his medication, his father said.
“People don’t realize their children don’t have any rights,” the woman who identified herself as the detained boy’s grandmother said.
Protesters said the children inside the juvenile detention center and at least 10 adults face charges in connection with a shooting at Village Creek Park that wounded five people on May 10. The 15-year-old and his relatives aren’t named in this story because the Star-Telegram does not typically identify juvenile suspects.
Police estimate the park gathering drew more than 400 people, many of whom were shown running in fear when the gunfire started, according to video released by police. The 15-year-old left the park before the shooting started, the grandmother said.
The relatives asked that the protesters return on Thursday for the teen’s detention hearing and amplify their voices. They should not return to the detention center just because her grandson is locked up inside, the grandmother said.
Protesters should come back because other children — whose parents cannot afford an attorney or the bond to get their children out of adult jail — are also locked up for no reason, the grandmother said.
“I remember they did the same thing to me when I was growing up,” said Natasha “Nysse” Nelson, a Black Lives Matter activist who said she helped the family organize the protest. “I was 17 and police came and grabbed me and my friends while I was in school. It wasn’t a shooting, though, it was because of a gang-related fight. This brings back old memories.”
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.
Court records show that the adults 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. Each faces a charge of engaging in organized crime, according to court records.
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 told police 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.
