Social media erupted in March 2017 when a teenage father was gunned down in a daytime shooting in the Oak Cliff neighborhood in Dallas, Texas.

The daylight murder was caught on camera by witnesses and quickly went viral on social media. People in the area, including the victim’s mother, identified the suspect seen on the footage. This shocking event is detailed in Snapped: Killer Couples, airing Sundays at 6/5c on Oxygen.

“When I saw who it was, I thought, ‘Wait a minute!’” recalled Lashandra Alex, mother of 19-year-old Drekeiston “Dre” Alex. Her son died after losing a significant amount of blood from a gunshot wound to his leg as he was being taken to the hospital. “I know him. Like, I know him personally. I know this kid.”

What happened to Drekeiston “Dre” Alex?

In the morning of March 2, 2017, a maroon Dodge PT Cruiser stopped where Drekeiston “Dre” Alex was walking along a street in Oak Cliff. The driver stayed in the car as a gunman stepped out of the passenger seat. After a short argument with Drekeiston, the gunman fired a shot that hit him in the leg.

The shooter got back into the vehicle and fled the scene, but already bystanders in the open public area were filming the shooting’s tragic aftermath. Drekeiston’s mother received a phone call: “I jump in the car. As I’m driving, I get a video online,” LaShandra Alex told Snapped: Killer Couples. “It was him on the stretcher — and his head was just, you know, hanging from the stretcher.”

Friends remember Drekeiston as both a standout high school athlete and a budding performer with aspirations to become a rap star — a passion he shared with a childhood friend named Hakeem Griffin-White. The former friends’ relationship had soured since their childhood days, however, and the two had turned more hostile toward each other whenever their paths would cross.

“I don’t know the incident or what drama took place for them to not become friends,” said Griffin-White’s fiancée, Valarie Bender. “The only thing that I do remember is whenever Dre did come around, he was always trying to fight Hakeem.”

“The rumor was that this was this long-standing beef, and that’s kind of how these feuds sometimes linger,” explained Dallas Police detective Andrea Isom to Snapped: Killer Couples. “Someone’s going to retaliate until they’re the bigger person or the winner.”

Ashley Coleman and Hakeem Griffin-White become murder suspects

Nearby surveillance camera footage gave Dallas investigators a more complete understanding of the shooting, and they quickly issued a lookout notice for the involved PT Cruiser.

It wasn’t long before they located the vehicle, registered to a 27-year-old woman named Ashley Coleman, parked outside the home of one of Coleman’s relatives. At the same residence, they also encountered a moving truck — a sign that Coleman, if she was involved in the crime, might be preparing to flee.

Police tailed both vehicles once they had left the house together, staying with the moving truck after losing the PT Cruiser. Not long after, though, they found the PT Cruiser abandoned — even as detectives were meanwhile piecing together a disturbing story from social media evidence.

Coleman was 10 years older than Griffin-White, and through her public-facing persona as an aspiring local rapper was known to many in the neighborhood  by her stage name of “Mamme Kash.” Police retrieved footage from an online video posted only moments before the time of Drekeiston’s murder — and in it, both Coleman and Griffin-White appeared to make bold threats alluding to an apparent intent to kill someone.

Why did Coleman and Griffin-White turn to murder?

Behind the name of “Mamme Kash,” Coleman leaned into gangster culture as part of her stage brand. But in the immediate wake of Drekeiston’s murder, she took to social media to quickly distance her real self from her violently-styled stage alter-ego.

“Ashley went on social media saying, ‘That’s not my car. My car looks different.’ And Hakeem was saying, ‘That’s not me. That’s a different person,’” recalled Isom. “So they knew that they had been caught on camera.”

Hakeem Griffin-White first befriended Alex Coleman as a younger fan of her “Mamme Kash” rap ambitions, following her on social media and eventually becoming a fixture by her side at local shows. At the time of Drekeiston Alex’s death, Griffin-White was 17 years old — 10 years younger than Coleman.

“She was claiming to be his Bonnie and calling him her Clyde,” Texas Metro News journalist Eva D. Coleman, who followed the murder case, told Snapped: Killer Couples. “…Hakeem was a fan. He followed Ashley on social media. He was in her DMs. He was someone who showed up to her performances… They both glorified negativity. They were hyping each other up.”

Once in custody, Griffin-White appeared to minimize Coleman’s role in Alex’s murder, while Coleman told police she felt like a “victim” of Griffin-White’s increasingly violent and controlling temperament. Detectives, though, found Coleman’s account of their relationship dynamic unlikely.

“None of that story really made sense, based on her social media that they’re putting all this stuff on,” said Dallas Police detective David Grubbs. “Everything about her demeanor was just very manipulative throughout my entire interaction with her. She was ready to throw him under the bus as soon as she could.”

Now in prison for first-degree murder, Griffin-White maintains that the “gangster” online persona he shared with Ashley Coleman doesn’t reflect his real-life values.

“I learned in the industry you have to have some type of façade so people won’t just attack you or something like that,” Griffin-White said in a recent prison interview. “People want to see that gangster.”

Thanks to Texas’ “law of parties,” which extends equal liability to those convicted of assisting in a crime, Coleman is also in prison after accepting an offer from prosecutors to plead guilty to first-degree murder. She will be eligible for parole in 2026. Griffin-White, meanwhile, will be eligible for parole in 2047.