Update: Police arrested two teens suspected of shooting and killing a 1-year-old toddler in his stroller in Brunswick (GA) Thursday morning.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that police arrested the 2 teens Friday afternoon, after scouring school absentee records for their names.
Seventeen-year-old De’Marquis Elkins is charged as an adult with first-degree murder, along with a 14-year-old who was not identified because he is a juvenile, Police Chief Tobe Green told the AJC.
The teens approached Sherry West Friday morning at 9:15 a.m. near her rented house in a quiet residential neighborhood. West said one of the teens demanded money from her.
“He asked me for money and I said I didn’t have it,” she said. “When you have a baby, you spend all your money on babies. They’re expensive. And he kept asking and I just said ‘I don’t have it.’ And he said, ‘Do you want me to kill your baby?’ And I said, ‘No, don’t kill my baby!'”
She said the older boy fired a shot into the ground from a handgun, but she didn’t see the gun eject a shell so she believed it was a toy gun.
He then fired a shot past her head. The bullet grazed her ear leaving a small bruise. The teen fired 4 shots in all. One bullet hit her in the leg.
“The boy proceeded to go around to the stroller and he shot my baby in the face,” she said. “And then he just shoved me when I started screaming and he ran down London Street with the little boy.”
Antonio’s father, Luis Santiago, (pictured above with West) said he wished he could have been there to protect his family.
“He was special,” Santiago said. “He had the bluest, bluest eyes.”
West also lost her 18-year-old son, Shaun Glassey, to violence in New Jersey in 2008.
“He and some other boys were going to ambush a kid,” Bernie Weisenfeld, a spokesman for the Gloucester County prosecutor’s office, told the AP Friday.
One of the boys disarmed Glassey, who had a knife, and turned the knife on him. The 17-year-old who stabbed Glassey in self-defense was not charged.
