Four teenagers have been arrested in connection with a drive-by shooting that killed a Tennessee high school student after a football game in late August.
The arrests were announced six weeks after Cameron Frierson, 16, was fatally shot in front of his younger brother, Chris. The brothers had just attended a football game at Pearl-Cohn High School in Nashville on Aug. 21, according to police.
Jon’quavous Johns-Collins, 18, Marcelle Stem Jr., 17, Lil Tay Webster, 17, and Zachkeius Brown, 16, each face charges of criminal homicide and criminal conspiracy, the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department said Friday.
At Friday’s court hearing, Cameron’s mother, Brittany Frierson, came face-to-face with one of the suspects. She told all four that 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 mother told WKRN-TV, Nashville’s ABC affiliate.
Police said the four teenagers were in a vehicle when “multiple shots were fired” at about 10:30 p.m. on the night Cameron was killed.
Cameron, a junior at Hunters Lane High School, was hit by the gunfire. Responding officers found him suffering from multiple gunshot wounds.
He was taken to Vanderbilt University Medical Center, where he was later pronounced dead.
His younger brother was not injured in the shooting.
Authorities said the motive remains under investigation.
Witnesses told police the gunfire came from a white sedan with tinted windows, WKRN-TV reported.
All four suspects were under 18 when the shooting occurred and were charged in juvenile court, according to a police department news release.
For Cameron’s mother, Friday’s hearing brought both renewed pain and a measure of hope. 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.
Frierson said she feels sympathy for the difficult circumstances some of the teens may have faced while growing up, but stressed that their backgrounds do not excuse the alleged attack.
“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 WKRN-TV.
“My son did nothing to them,” she said. Frierson added 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.”
She also urged the community to take greater responsibility for its children, saying, “we have to do better with our kids.” The teens, she said, were “obviously hurting bad enough where they felt the need to go out and hurt someone else.”
“It starts at home,” Frierson said.
