Family of slain Casselberry teen seeks answers
CASSELBERRY – Kim Crow called her 17-year-old grandson 106 times on the night he was killed.
She had asked Bryce Williams to pick up a bottle of ibuprofen for her, but he never showed, so Crow used an app on her phone that redialed his number automatically. She used it whenever he ignored her calls because she knew he usually gave in. But not on Monday night. About 8 p.m., she heard police sirens near her Casselberry home. Shortly afterward, she received a call from the mother of one of Bryce’s friends, who was in the back seat of his car.
“Where are our kids?” the friend’s mom asked Crow.
Crow, 54, ran out of her home in sandals and headed toward nearby Lake Hodge Park. Standing behind police lines at the crime scene, she heard
the news.
Casselberry police said they found Bryce in the driver’s seat of a Kia with a gunshot wound to his head. He tried to drive away after being shot but instead crashed into a home on Osceola Trail. Firefighters performed CPR, but Bryce was declared dead at the scene.
Bryce was killed just a block from the home where his grandmother helped raise him.
“You know that saying that ‘It takes a village’? Bryce had a village,” Crow said Friday. “He had input from all these people.”
In the days following the incident, Crow and her partner, 59-year-old Marcia Burden, were quickly joined by members of Bryce’s tightknit family: his great-grandfather, Von Sanders, 75, and his wife, Vickie, 54, who live in Tennessee; and his aunt, Gwen Burden, 56.
Bryce’s mother — Melanie Crow Tucker, 34, who lives in Idaho — flew to Florida when she received the news.
“Everything’s kind of a mystery there,” Crow Tucker said. “He loved life. He wanted to live it to the fullest… I would like to know why.”
That night, she was speechless, but she stayed on the phone, in silence, with her mom.
“We were just phone-holding that night,” Crow said. “Like we were holding hands.”
In the car with Bryce, who was a senior at Winter Springs High School, was a 16-year-old girl, and a 19-year-old male friend. They were both unharmed. Casselberry police are searching for three males and one female who were seen leaving the scene in a dark-colored car. They said they don’t know why Bryce was shot.
“There’s anger there, like we’ve been robbed of him,” Crow said. “My prayer for Melanie was for her to make it safely to the other side… Now, there is no other side. It’s maddening.”
Crow Tucker said she hopes that someone will come forward with information about what led to the shooting.
“My mom is a success story. I am a success story. He’ll never have that opportunity,” Crow Tucker said. “There are gonna be things that are gonna come out that are not going to be pretty, but that’s not him.”
“He was a defender of people,” she said. “I think he wanted to think he was bigger, grown, but he was no good at it. That’s not who he was.”
Family and friends gathered at Lake Hodge Park on Tuesday night for a vigil, and Bryce’s grandmother said she was moved by the memories she heard — some from strangers.
“I heard so many stories at the vigil,” Crow said. “Moms were telling me that when their kids were new at Milwee [Middle School], Bryce took them under his wing and he was there to protect them, be there for them, help them transition. He had a heart of gold.”
Crow said she now takes the long way home every day to drive by the park, where candles burn at a makeshift memorial.
When she sees anyone there, she pulls over and gives them a hug. In return, she gets their stories.
“I guess he had relationships or discussions with people that I will never know about.”