Aaron Choice would have some choice words for the person who killed him.
At least, that's what his mother says, almost two years since he was gunned down in South Los Angeles.
"I'm asking for the community to please help me find this killer, this thug on the streets," Kim Hardy says as she returns to the place she once lived with her son near 35th and Cimmaron Streets.
It was April 20, 2016.
Gunshots rang out and Hardy heard them, prompting her to call 911.
"I did not know it was him, I just heard the shots," she says.
LAPD South Bureau Homicide Detective Robert Fraga says Choice was with a friend walking home just after dusk.
"He was coming from a nearby store when a male approached him, pulled out a gun and shot him multiple times," he says, adding that the suspect jumped into what may be a dark-colored Prius and then sped off into the night.
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"Somebody out there is sleeping with a killer," Hardy cried. "And we need to get him off the streets!"
Choice had just graduated from high school and had begun to show interest in joining the military. Now his mother is left to carry his torch.
"I'm asking the community to please help," she said, eager to remind any possible witnesses of a $50,000 reward for information. "If you have any tips out there, please call us and let the LAPD know anything you know of what happened to my son."
Hardy says every day is harder than the last, that she clutches her cell phone even in her sleep as she hopes to get that one phone call from police that could help her find closure.
"I don't want any mother to have to go through what I went through," she says, with a direct message to the killer: "You know who you are, you know what you did to my son. Be a man, standup to what you did."
