In the last conversation Brady Dale Flowers II had with his mother, she told him to be careful about the friends he kept. A few weeks earlier, he’d thrown a rooftop cookout without permission, some 30 kids showed up at their Southwest Washington apartment building, and she’d received a lease violation letter.
“You’re going to have to understand,” Shantae Flowers recalled saying to the 18-year-old that morning. “It’s cool to have friends, but you have to have a boundary of how close you let everybody.”
That afternoon, someone shot the teen in an alley behind a CVS drugstore just a few hundred feet from the weight room at Jackson Reed High School, where he was a star football player weeks from his June graduation. Police have not detailed what they believe happened, except to say 10 to 15 kids were seen running from the scene after the gunfire.
Flowers died the next day, May 8. His mother said hospital staff told her they’d never fully stopped the bleeding and finally ran out of blood for him.
The teen’s death was among D.C.’s 34 homicides in the city as of Friday in a year when violent crime has generally gone down, according to D.C. police statistics.
But the incident in the Tenleytown neighborhood, and additional gunfire involving young people the day after Flowers was shot, have left families on edge in an area that thousands of students stream through each weekday from several nearby schools. They include Flowers’ sister, a cheerleader in 11th grade at Jackson Reed.
Joshua Daniel, a priest at St. Columba’s Episcopal Church not far away from the high school, has three children in the neighborhood’s schools. He talked with other kids about the pair of shootings a few days after Flowers died.
“When we talk to many of the students who knew the child who was shot and died, many of them were, I think the only word to describe it was numb to the violence,” he told other residents at an Advisory Neighborhood Commission meeting held Thursday night.
“These children have all grown up hearing about shootings, and seeing them, and being affected by them,” Daniel said. “I just want to say how sad that is.”
Flowers’ football teammates described him as a charismatic jokester who frequently wore a big smile. He worked as a cook at Gordon Ramsay Fish & Chips at the Wharf, his mother said, and he was about to start a second job as a locker room attendant at the Waldorf Astoria on Pennsylvania Avenue.
“He was really looking forward to it,” said his aunt, Alisha Cole. “He liked fancy things, and so I think when he came in there he was just a bit in awe of the glory that the property is.”
“Like most teenage boys,” Cole said, “he liked music, he liked girls, he liked fashion, cars, sports. He liked hanging out with his friends.”
The area around CVS and Whole Foods along Wisconsin Avenue is a regular meetup spot for Jackson Reed students after school. The commercial strip gets congested as school lets out, creating a bustling scene of kids rushing in and out of fast food restaurants or milling around in front of them. Some residents complain of the occasional smell of marijuana or kids being less than respectful to passersby.
Flowers had brought about $600 in cash to school the day he was shot, his mother said. Police told her they found it afterward on the street in his bookbag. He liked having the stack of cash, she said, though normally he would leave it at home. She speculated that maybe he intended to buy an outfit or something for prom.
Shantae Flowers said the story she’s heard, passed to her from a teen who was there, is that her son was with friends when the shooting happened. One or several turned on him for whatever reason — “possibly to rob him.”
“They said one of the guys held him, one of them had a gun and gave it to the shooter,” she said. “They said the shooter, while the other guy held him, was hitting him in his face with the gun.”
One group of teens tried to help Brady, and he managed to get free as the story went, his mother said. “They said as he was running, he tripped,” she said. “He didn’t fall, but because he tripped, it slowed him up, and then that is when he got shot.”
The bullet hit Flowers in the hip. When his mother arrived at George Washington University Hospital, a doctor said her son was stable, she said.
Within hours, she was told his condition was critical. When she saw him, he was hooked to a ventilator.
The next morning, she said, hospital staffers told her the blood wouldn’t stay in her son’s body. She asked where the bullet was, and they said they didn’t know. They did scans, performed surgery.
“They kept giving him blood, and they said that the blood had acid in it,” she said. “Then they said they were going to do a dialysis on him. Then they said they don’t have no more blood to give him.
“They ran out of blood,” Shantae Flowers said. “He used all the blood up in their blood bank.”
He died that afternoon.
Flowers said the same name keeps coming up as the shooter’s, a student at Jackson Reed. Flowers said she hasn’t convicted the child in her mind.
“I’m telling a story, but I’m hoping that the police do their job,” she said. “My heart tells me that name has come up, but I wasn’t there.”
Flowers said she feels sadness, not anger. “And the reason is because they’re still kids.”
She added about whoever is responsible for her son’s death: “Even if he doesn’t go to jail or whatever, God will, you know, have to deal with that. Or he will have to deal with God.”
No arrests had been made, but homicide detectives were talking to witnesses, looking at video surveillance, processing forensic evidence and “making good progress,” Christopher Dorsey, commander of D.C. police’s second district, told people at the ANC meeting.
“I am confident in the detectives, they are phenomenal,” Dorsey said, “and they are working the case really hard.”
Police are offering a $25,000 reward for information leading to an arrest. Anyone with information is asked to call (202) 727-9099 or text tips to 50411.
Next month, on graduation day, Shantae Flowers said, she plans to put on her son’s black Louis Vuitton shoes and walk the stage for him.
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