His mom, Jennifer Price, said she was vacuuming her car at the carwash when Tevin asked if he could have two dollars to get something from the smoke shop, African Tobacco. When he returned, he told her that two boys had asked him to take off his red tennis shoes but he didn’t want to.
“I said come on lets go,” said Price. “Before I could put the hose down this boy had walked up to Tevin, shot him in the back twice at close range.” Tevin turned to face the shooter who then fired twice more into Tevin’s chest. “When he put that last bullet in Tevin, that’s when I I started chasing,” Price said.
Tevin’s mom chased the boy across Florence, behind a liquor store to an apartment building, then stopped and ran back to her son’s side.
A woman was with Tevin, applying pressure to his wounds. “He grabbed my arm and said, ‘mommy I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die.’ I was like baby you are not going to die and his eyes started rolling back in his head and I said Tevin, Tevin, look at me! And he grabbed my hand and by that time the paramedics came.”
Price said she wasn’t allowed to ride in the ambulance with her son. The police asked her to stay to give a statement. Tevin, who was disabled, had the mental capacity of a fourteen-year-old. “I should have been there,” said Price. “I know my son was scared.” Tevin died from the gunshot wounds. He would have been 20-years-old on June 1st.
Six days after his murder, friends and family of Tevin’s gathered at the spot where he was killed to hold a rally. Flowers and Mexican prayer candles surrounded a streetlight covered in posters with Tevin’s picture.
Standing in the street, with homemade posters that said, “We Want Justice” and “We Love You,” supporters yelled and asked drivers to honk their horns in support of Tevin and his family. Some held out paper cups to raise money for the funeral and burial expenses.
There is a surveillance video that may have captured the shooting. Police have not released it to the public. They are asking anyone with information about the shooting to call Crime Stoppers at 800-222-8477.
Price said she’ll keep protesting until her son’s killer is caught. “Every day I’m going to be out here. They gunned my son down in my face and nobody, no councilman, nobody came out here to talk about none of this. Somebody’s got to do something.”