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 came exactly six weeks after 16-year-old Cameron Frierson was fatally shot in front of his younger brother, Chris. The siblings had attended a football game at Pearl-Cohn High School in Nashville on Aug. 21, police said.
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 announced Friday.
During Friday’s court appearance, Cameron’s mother, Brittany Frierson, came face-to-face with one of the teens accused in her son’s killing. She warned all four suspects 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 local ABC affiliate WKRN-TV.
Police said the four teens were inside a vehicle when “multiple shots were fired” at about 10:30 p.m. on the night of the shooting.
Cameron, a junior at Hunters Lane High School, was struck by the gunfire. Responding officers found him suffering from several gunshot wounds.
He was taken to Vanderbilt University Medical Center, where he was later pronounced dead.
Cameron’s younger brother was not injured in the shooting.
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Authorities said the motive remained under investigation.
Witnesses told investigators that the shots came from a white sedan with tinted windows, according to WKRN-TV.
All four suspects were under 18 when the shooting occurred and were charged in juvenile court, according to a police department news release.
The court hearing was an emotional but important moment for Cameron’s mother. Despite her grief, 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 has sympathy for the difficult circumstances some of the arrested teens may have faced while growing up, but she 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 the outlet.
“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 adults to take greater responsibility for young people, 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 emphasized.
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