Daphne Lamb speaks of her 39-year-old son, Warren James Kelly, as any mother would.
"He never gave me any trouble," she says of his teenage years. But Lamb says that she didn't realize beyond her careful parenting, Kelly had begun to make connections in local gangs.
"We lived in a jungle," she said, and she moved her family out of South LA to Long Beach.
And yet, the gang life didn't stop for Kelly. His senior year of high school, he dropped out, but his mom never realized it.
"I dropped him off at school, picked him up at school," she said. "But then the report card came, and Warren wasn't in school."
It's important to know Kelly's background to understand why, on April 4, 2015, his lifeless body was left with a single gunshot wound in a South LA alley.
"I was the type of mother that I would go through his whole room from top to bottom, looking for spray paint, looking for anything that would tell me he was in the streets," Lamb said. "I never found anything."
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Kelly had a rap sheet: an assault is what his mom said started his downward spiral. But by the time he was killed, his girlfriend said he was trying to turn his life around.
"The Warren I knew was not gang-related," said Marcela Rivera, the mother of Kelly's 2-year-old son. "He was a hard-working man. He was the nicest person. If someone needed something, he was there."
And that's why she said, regardless of his background or the sins in his life, Kelly should be here today.
"I don't think he deserved to die this way. Nobody does," Rivera says.
The Los Angeles Police Department South Bureau Criminal Gang Homicide detectives are going through never-before-released surveillance video that shows two persons of interest - both of them women - that may shed light into those last moments before Kelly was killed.
LAPD Detective Rene Castro said the video shows two women walking together - and then splitting up: one walking in the middle of the street on 8th and Jefferson, towards Kelly, and the other walking along the sidewalk and into an alley.
"The victim comes out from the sidewalk onto the street and it appears that he might meet with the female," Castro said. "They both pass each other, the female continues northbound on 8th Avenue and our victim comes over walking on the street towards the alley."
It's what happens in that alley between 7th and 8th Avenues that is not part of what you can see in the surveillance video.
"Was there someone else here? Is the female that walked in the alley, is she even in play?" Castro asked. "Our biggest question is what made him leave the house -- he was about to come and meet this female in the alley?"
His mother said Kelly was a fan of women. With a smile, she says her son had many girlfriends through the years. The day he died, she says he had come by to see her and told her had an unexplained uneasy feeling.
"I said, 'Remember to pray,'" Lamb recalled. "And ask the good Lord to go with you."
Lamb said someone on a bicycle she did not recognize came to her home hours later to tell her that Kelly had been shot.
"The only thing I could have said in that moment was, 'Oh my God, please give me the strength,'" she said. Lamb rushed to the scene but never saw her son alive.
"And then I see the ambulance leave. And it was like a shot went through my body," she said through tears. "I didn't get to see him, I didn't get to hold him."
A flood of 911 calls came in, a crowd gathered at the alleyway; the shooter was gone and Warren James Kelly was dead.
"I know it's somebody out there that is a coward that shot him," Lamb said.
LAPD has kept in close contact with Lamb, hoping that more attention on her son's case will help lure the killer to turn himself or herself in.
Rivera hopes so.
"It hasn't been easy," she said. "I loved him dearly and I still do. We need closure. We need justice."
Anyone with tips on the case is asked to contact LAPD detectives at (323) 786-5113. Callers can remain anonymous.
