My son Anthony Dyer, who was 16 years old, had, um, got . . . had joined a gang. Got in or about, and the gang that he was in, they murdered him. My son hadn‘t come home, and it was on my pay week, and he hadn‘t come home for 2 days That Friday, I was gonna call the television station and ask them to air my son on the TV, but that evening I heard about a body that had been found, and I didn‘t feel comfortable with that. I went down to look at the body, and what I saw . . . it didn‘t look like my son because his face was swollen; he was frozen. It was a bitter cold. The only way that I really identified him was by his fingernail biting. And it was hard . . . it was very hard to deal with that.
They ended up beating him. Then they wrapped him up and put him in a towel and put him in a trash can. So the leader of the gang told them to ―69‖ him, which meant kill him. So one of the guys went down the hill and kicked him in his head until he wasn‘t breathing anymore, and he took his gym shoes off that I had just bought him. When then finally picked him up, the guy that had kicked him in his head, he had his shoes on.
I didn‘t even know my son was in a gang until after he passed. He was only 16. To me, he was still a baby. I had a memory loss. People that I had known for years I couldn‘t remember who they were. I couldn‘t go back to work for at least 3 weeks. You know, people would question me about different things, and I didn‘t want to deal with it. I was crying all the time. It‘s just your whole life, you know, you‘re just turned upside down.
None of them showed any remorse. The next year, three of them will get out. They plea bargained. Some of them got 7 years. One of the girls that cleaned up the blood at the apartment that he had got beat up at, she‘s out. The leader of the gang got 15–30. The one guy that had his gym shoes only got 12 years—no, he got 16 years. And the guy that took his clothes off and burned them, he got 12 years. So they all got time.
If you committed a crime and just totally shut out and you‘re going on with your life, well, that family, they‘re not going on ‗cause theirs is forever changed. It‘s--it will never, never be the same. And it hurts. Because I know my son wanted to live, and it wasn‘t fair. It was not fair.
