Information still scarce a year after Webber’s death
Killed by Marshals, family has more questions
The first time Jaleta Clark saw Brandon Webber’s body after he was shot by members of the United States Marshals Service, her 20-year-old son had already been dead four days, she said.
The bullets shattered his skull, neck and hip bones. They nearly detached his thumb on one hand, ripped one of his legs from his body and damaged all of his internal organs, she said.
“There were holes everywhere except the bottom of his feet,” Clark said in her first detailed account of what happened since her son’s death one year ago. “Every part of his body was shot up ... I identified pieces of my baby.”
Webber was killed in the front yard of his mother’s Frayser home on June 12, 2019. The Marshals Service was there to serve an arrest warrant on charges of armed robbery, aggravated assault and conspiracy to commit armed robbery.
Webber was accused of shooting a man five times and stealing his car in Hernando about a week prior, Desoto County District Attorney John Champion said at the time.
Marshals said they shot him because he rammed their cars.
Since then, almost no new information has been released either about the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation’s probe into his confrontation with law enforcement in Frayser or about the incident in Mississippi that led to it.
‘He didn’t grow up this way’
The person Clark would hear prosecutors and law enforcement officers describe in the days that followed her son’s death didn’t fit with who she knew Webber to be during his short life.
The son she knew had excelled in
school since he was in the Head Start program. He finished sixth grade second in his class. He graduated from Central High School with honors. He went on to University of Memphis where he planned to study psychology and criminal justice.
When his younger brother struggled in school, he tutored him. He liked to draw and he taught himself to play the piano and later the guitar. He was also trying to get a rap career off the ground.
When his high school girlfriend got pregnant and gave birth to his son Brandon Webber Jr. several weeks premature, he took a break from his freshman year of college to help care for the baby – born 1 pound, 14 ounces – and ensure that she, too, would be able to get an education.
Still, Clark didn’t hold her son on a pedestal.
She recognized both his strengths and his flaws. For example, she knew he sold marijuana and that he often did so on live videos broadcast from his Facebook page.
Clark and Webber’s stepfather, Uzico Parker, had told him to stop but Webber never felt like he was doing anything wrong. After all, Webber would say, the drug was already legal in several other states. He figured it was only a matter of time before it would be legal in Tennessee too, Parker said.
But to shoot a stranger, steal his car and then drive around in the stolen car for days? She doesn’t believe her son was capable of that kind of violence.
In fact, days earlier he had stopped by the house so Parker could help him change the oil and transmission fluid on the car. After letting other cars fall into disrepair in the past, he was determined to take care of this one.
“I don’t see how or why my son’s mind would flip to where he would think ‘I’m going to take somebody’s car,’” Clark said. “He didn’t grow up robbing, stealing, killing. He didn’t grow up this way. That’s not what or who I know.”
Clark said she would accept it and apologize to the victim’s family if it really happened the way the Hernando Police Department said it did. But she won’t accept that until she has seen the evidence that proves it.
“He was a perfect son for me,” Clark said. “Now they are making me, from