Five years after he was shot and killed, a family is still grieving and seeking justice for a Los Angeles man who they knew was destined to help his community.
Kendrick Blackmon was driving his friends in his beloved Chevy Monte Carlo in the early morning hours of April 21, 2012 near Century Boulevard and San Pedro Street, on his way home, where he lived with his grandmother. But when an SUV pulled up alongside them, gunfire broke the night silence.
"When they SUV gets to the stoplight here at Century and San Pedro, they pull up to the No. 2 lane," said Los Angeles Police Department South Bureau homicide detective Melvin Hernandez. "They ask Kendrick and his friends, 'Where you from?'"
Those words, Hernandez said, are some of the most common in gang shootings in South Los Angeles.
"These gang members, they profile guys, and they did something very cowardly and they shot and killed Kendrick," he said.
"The pain stays with you every birthday, every Christmas. The graduations, the children being born - all the event that he's not there for you, you live with absence," said Jocelyn Stewart," Kendrick Blackmon's aunt. "We've lost a part of our future."
Stewart's pain mirrors the rest of the family's, who hope to show their community what could have been if Kendrick Blackmon could have lived.
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Kendrick Blackmon played drums in the Locke High School band. He used that base to become a weekly volunteer at Solid Rock Baptist Church. "We lost someone who could have contributed greatly, who already was contributing in great ways to this community," Stewart said.
"He had a good heart, a good heart," said Alberta Blackmon, Kendrick Blackmon's grandmother. "My thing is, how can you live with yourself for just taking somebody's life who had not done anything to you? I know there's a price to pay in hell for you, but how can you live with yourself?"
The LAPD is as determined as Kendrick Blackmon's family to track down the suspects. They're looking not only for the driver of the SUV, which they think might be a Lexus, but any of the four other passengers inside.
"We owe it to him to find who did this," Stewart said. "Not only do we owe it to his spirit to find who did this, we owe it to the ones who are coming up because they deserve a better world."
