Unanswered calls for help?
She lodged two complaints, saying people affiliated with a gang were harassing her son
The mother of a slain Lamar High School student said she alerted police to gang threats to her son in 2016, before he was gunned down last week near campus.
As a Houston family buried their son — slain Lamar High School student De’Lindsey Mack — police reports revealed that his mother warned police at least twice that a gang was threatening him.
One of those threats was believed to be from the 103 Boys street gang in the Third Ward, where 18-year-old De’Lindsey used to attend Yates High School. The December 2016 complaint was the first of at least two lodged by the mother, according to police reports obtained by the Houston Chronicle.
In the 2016 report, when De’Lindsey was just 16, his mother told an officer that at least one person affiliated with the gang was harassing her son. The officer classified the incident as a gang crime.
The gang identified in the police report emerged in Houston Chronicle reports in 2016 but does not appear on a public list of Houston-area gangs managed by federal and local law enforcement. De’Lindsey’s mother dialed police again nearly two years later, according to the second report. On April 24 of this year, a document shows two suspects associated with a 2002 Lincoln-Continental threatened her son’s life. The report was not listed as gang-related.
The nature of each threat was not elaborated in either of the police reports. During both calls, the mother alerted authorities to the threats from their Meyerland home along Brays Bayou.
De’Lindsey was homeschooled for two years and then transferred to Lamar’s River Oaks campus. He was gunned down last week a block from the school as a family friend waited to pick him up. The assailant
fired about a dozen shots and continued to shoot the teen as he lay dying on the pavement.
Houston police Executive Assistant Chief Troy Finner said the fatal shooting was possibly gangrelated and that De’Lindsey was likely targeted. No arrests in the case have been reported.
A police helicopter on Tuesday morning hovered over the Good Hope Missionary Baptist Church as De’Lindsey’s funeral service took place with more than a thousand mourners. He was buried at a cemetary in Pearland.
The teen’s family declined to speak to members of the press after the service, while a spokesman for the Macks, the Rev. D.Z. Cofield, could not be reached to discuss the police reports.
During a press conference Monday, De’Lindsey’s father, Dwight Mack, told reporters his son was by no means a gang member even though private messages and images he posted to Instagram portrayed him as such. In one photo, De’Lindsey brandished a handgun and a wad of cash.
The elder Mack said he and the teen’s mother were unaware of their son’s social media activity until they began combing through his accounts after his death.
Cofield said De’Lindsey was a “big talker,” but not the gang member he made himself out to be. He participated in youth ministry at his Good Hope church.
“Anybody who knew him, knew he was not,” Cofield said Monday.