Cold case victim ‘didn’t deserve to die like that,’ mother says
Five-year-old Aubrielle Stevenson shrinks her arms and hides her head on her grandmother’s stomach, shying away from a message she intended to give in front of a camera.
“Do you want me to say it for you?” asks Terrilyn Bowser, looking down on the little girl, who nods her head.
“Aubrielle wants to know, why did the man (have to) take her dad,” Bowser says.
It’s a question that’s been on the minds of Javerian Stevenson’s family and Metro Police investigators for four years. The 22-year-old became an “unintended victim” of gun violence after a man opened fire through a car’s front passenger window in the central valley to kill Stevenson, the father of three girls.
“The family that’s behind me right now,” said Metro Lt. Ray Spencer about the victim’s loved ones who one afternoon last week held white balloons outside Liberty Baptist Church, 6501 W. Lake Mead Blvd. “They want answers just as much as the community should demand answers for what happened out here four years ago.”
The remembrance rally was an effort to try to crack the case open by compelling the gunman to turn himself in, or for someone who may know something to speak up.
“We are close on this case,” Spencer said, noting that even a trivial detail may be the final puzzle piece detectives need to solve the shooting.
Stevenson was one of three passengers in a car at 10:15 p.m. on April 29, 2014, when the driver stopped to check on a tire near Washington Avenue and Tonopah Drive, according to an account given to police. That’s where the fatal rounds erupted.
No one else was injured, Spencer said,