Four teens were busted in connection to a drive-by shooting that killed a Tennessee high schooler after a football game in late August.
The arrests came exactly six weeks after Cameron Frierson, 16, was fatally shot in front of his younger brother Chris after the two boys attended a football game at Pearl-Cohn High School in Nashville on August 21, local police said.
Jon’quavous Johns-Collins, 18, Marcelle Stem Jr., 17, Lil Tay Webster, 17, and Zachkeius Brown, 16, were each slapped with charges of criminal homicide and engaging in criminal conspiracy, the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department announced Friday.
The slain teen’s mom, Brittany Frierson, came face-to-face with one of her son’s accused killers in court Friday — and warned the four suspects they “will see my face at every court hearing.”
“I don’t care how long it takes. I’m going to be here every day,” the grieving mom told local ABC affiliate WKRN-TV.
The four teens were inside of a vehicle from which “multiple shots were fired” at 10:30 p.m. the night of the killing, cops said.
Cameron Frierson, a Hunters Lane High School junior, was struck by the spray of bullets and found with several gunshot wounds by responding officers.
He was rushed to Vanderbilt University hospital where he was later pronounced dead.
Frierson’s younger brother was unharmed.
Cops were still investigating the motive behind the shooting.
Witnesses at the time said the shots came from a white sedan with tinted windows, WKRN-TV reported.
All of the suspects were underage at the time of the shooting, and were each charged in juvenile court, the police department said in a media release.
The Friday court hearing was both painful and significant for the victim’s devastated mother but she said she was “thankful that my son is going to get the justice that he deserves because he didn’t deserve this.”
“He was mine, and you didn’t have a right to take him from me,” Brittany Frierson said.
The heartbroken mom said while she feels sympathy for the circumstances some of the arrested teens might have dealt with growing up, it doesn’t excuse what they allegedly did to her son.
“I feel a lot of empathy for them because I know what type of background they came from, and I know they probably didn’t have the easiest route, but that doesn’t give them the right to hurt somebody else,” she told the outlet.
“My son did nothing to them,” she said, claiming that “if it wasn’t Cameron, it would have been somebody that night because they already had it in their heads. That’s what they wanted to do.”
Frierson pleaded that “we have to do better with our kids” because “those kids were obviously hurting bad enough where they felt the need to go out and hurt someone else.”
“It starts at home,” she stressed.
