If anyone knew why, they weren’t telling.

 

So Shonda Mason picked through the weeds that climbed over the jagged asphalt. She searched the leafy overgrowth swallowing a fence. She ran fingers over dirt to find the cave of a bullet hole.

She knelt to study the stains on the street.

 

Bushes revealed nothing.

 

The blood had washed away.

 

Rap. Rap. Rap.

 

She pounded on the back door of one of the houses that butt against the street.

 

Rap. Rap. Rap.

 

She imagined eyes behind the peephole, someone peeling blinds apart to see her face. No answer.

 

A woman drove up next door, and Shonda ran to the car.

 

“We was trying to find the spot where my son got killed,” she said, leaning in through the stranger’s window.

 

“He was laying in the street,” the driver said. That was all she would say.

 

Five months after Shonda’s 18-year-old son was found dead, his murder remained unsolved. His file sat within a stack of cases of other dead black teenagers, cases without evidence because witnesses wouldn’t talk.

 

Shonda knew that someone in the neighborhood had seen or heard about what happened that night. She understood why they wouldn’t speak about it. There was a code here. Before Eric was gone, Shonda had followed the code, too.

 

The code was never memorized or recited. It seeped into her from grade school.

 

“There are boundaries you don’t cross,” she said.

 

When someone kills your own, you kill them. You don’t rely on police sirens. You don’t tell what you saw. You handle it.

 

When Eric was 15, Shonda sent him to the hospital with a bullet in his stomach to get stitched up, belly button to chest. She taught him to ignore court subpoenas, to keep his name off court documents and police investigations, to say I don’t remember and I don’t know and I didn’t see anything.

 

The juvenile who police say shot Eric that time went on to be charged with killing two people. Eric never said a word.

 

Shonda sold crack cocaine her entire adult life, but he never told.

 

When a 17-year-old Eric was in a shootout, the police knocked on her door and she told the officers he wasn’t there.

 

She bailed him out on other charges. She followed the code.

 

Then Eric was dead, and all her black-and-white thinking turned gray. She’s been calling police and visiting their offices, trying to trust the uniforms she lied to most of her life, trying to help the same officers who once hunted her son.

 

Months into the investigation, the men Shonda is convinced killed Eric are still in the neighborhood. They post pictures on Facebook and Twitter with guns pointed at the camera, guns in their beds, guns coming out of their pockets. They say they would rather die than run their mouths, that talkers should die.

 

“I keep a pocket full of cheese to bring out all the rats,” one wrote.

 

She could see them driving down Dodds Avenue, pumping gas at the Kanku station or at the Bi-Lo getting a jug of milk. They’ve told her to stop blaming them publicly. But she won’t stop.

 

The police tell her they think she is right about the killers. Detectives tell her they are doing what they can. She tries to do the rest.

 

And she wonders about the fundamentals of the inner city, the code. Is it helping people?

 

Or is it burying them?

 

 

Eric Mason Fluellen was just 18, but he was already a young man people knew. He was small, 5 feet 6 inches and 120 pounds, with caramel skin. Overall handsome, aside from the dark circles drooped under his hazel eyes. In East Chattanooga people called him Lil’ E.

 

His father had been a career burglar. His mother had been a dealer. One of his uncles had been a gangster, and his aunt, Towanda Sherrell, walked on crutches because she was shot in the neck at 17. When Eric was 4, he watched his aunt kill his father for nearly choking his mother to death.

 

He was born into reputation, but he wanted one of his own.

 

He wanted to make money the way the other boys made money. He wanted to earn respect the way the other boys earned respect.

 

Stand your ground, his mother told him. You got to get out there and fight because you ain’t gonna be no pretty boy.

 

He acted like he wasn’t afraid to run into a drug house with a gun drawn. He acted like he wasn’t afraid to sling crack or fight or run from police, his mother said. His friends wanted to prove the same mettle, she said.

 

Tone Tone, born Lee Antonio Clements Jr., was rising in rank in the Foust Street sect of the Gangster Disciples. Friends said he used to be a lanky, nerdy East Ridge High School student before pictures showed him with lines cut in his eyebrows and police wrote about him hiding from officers with loaded guns in his pockets.

 

Skream — Dominic Wright — was scrappy, older and the same rank. He called himself “hard2kill.” Like Tone Tone, he decided who was in and who was out.

 

O’Shae Smith, known as Thumpa Mac, was the biggest of the three, nearly 6 feet tall and 221 pounds. He liked to pose for pictures with stacks of money.

 

The four men spent nights together, partied together, traveled together and ate together.

 

Eric hadn’t been formally beaten into the group or “blessed in” with family ties, but he wanted a spot. Tone Tone called him his “right-hand man.”

 

He was with those three men on March 18, a Monday. That day, Shonda said, she begged him not to leave the house with Tone Tone and Thumpa Mac. She had bailed him out of jail weeks before, and he had already started robbing again. She’d found thousands of dollars in cash hidden in a plastic houseplant, and the possible consequences were starting to terrify her. But Eric was unwilling to listen. He told her he would die for his brothers, then stuffed the money in his boxer shorts and walked out the front door.

 

Someone took a picture of him that night that would be posted days later on Facebook. He stood by Tone Tone in a kitchen, wearing a white T-shirt and sagging blue jeans, the same clothes he would be found dead in. His hair was pulled back, and he appeared at ease. Both of them had their hands held up with their fingers shaped like the barrel of a handgun.

 

Before sunrise, Skream showed up at Eric’s house to tell the family Eric was dead. Ponshala, Eric’s 16-year-old sister, was the only one home. She agreed to ride with Skream to see the body because he had been Eric’s friend. Rap music bumped through the car stereo, and he said nothing. He stopped the car on the way to the scene and got out to talk to someone.

 

She used her phone to call her mother.

 

Eric is dead.

 

Are you sure?

 

Yeah Momma.They said he dead.

 

When Shonda got to the scene at 13th Avenue, on that dark street where all the houses face away, the yellow tape had been strung up and groups gathered on the sidewalk. Cars cruised by slowly. Eric was out of view, shot five times in the head.

 

She ran to the police.

 

Was it really Eric?

 

The officer nodded.

 

An investigator named Chris Blackwell was assigned to the homicide. He interviewed Skream, who said he’d just happened to drive by and notice the body. Other officers knocked on doors, finishing the traditional canvass. Blackwell counted seven interviews that night, none of which led to much.

 

Shonda’s conversations went differently. When the uniforms weren’t nearby, people whispered that Eric had stumbled into their yard before he fell on the road to die, that they saw men wearing black run down an alleyway, that they saw a shadow behind their house, that they saw a car speed away from the body. That they heard it was a case of envy … or revenge … or money.

 

Text messages flew. Cellphones rang. Twitter ignited. “GIP LilEric,” they all said.

 

Another Gangster in Paradise.

 

Four months passed with no arrest.

 

Shonda started taking medication for depression and anxiety. She watched cable. On the news she saw NFL star Aaron Hernandez arrested for a gang-related shooting. She watched the bad guys get caught on “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” where even dead prostitutes were quickly avenged.

 

“Everybody knows who did it,” said Skip Eberhardt, Shonda’s friend. “But people won’t talk … I  think she is going crazy.”

 

She wanted the police to break down suspects’ doors and take their guns. She wanted them to bug their cars and wiretap their houses. She wanted them to find their cellphone records, she said. She told Blackwell this.

 

“I am just tired, man,” she said. “These people go on and live their life like nothing happened.”

 

Blackwell took a clinical approach to the case. He took notes about what addresses he drove to and what numbers he called. At times, he forgot Shonda’s name, but referred to his 70-page file.

 

Shonda told him, “I know everything from who involved on down.”

 

He rolled his eyes. Prove it.

 

Eric wasn’t the first dead teen Blackwell had seen. He had spoken with grieving parents and crying spouses. He had been called a racist and a skinhead on patrol. He had learned to disassociate himself from the cases. For many of these teenagers, these ends were inevitable. And the community seemed to do little to stop it.

 

“You grow callous to it,” he said. “You feel nothing.”

 

It was a job. Order for autopsy. Death notification. Synopsis. Interdepartmental call logs. Consent searches. Phone subpoenas. Interview reports. It was a job he wanted to do well.

 

He didn’t cry for Eric, but he wanted to solve the killing.

 

There were days when he and Investigator Lucas Fuller sat in the car on surveillance for hours at a time. There were nights when he stayed into the early morning. He tallied 56 hours of overtime for Eric’s killing; Fuller put in overtime, too. In total, records show Blackwell logged more than 1,000 hours on the case.

 

“I understand the family is frustrated when they continue to hear the same things,” he said. “We have to have evidence.”

 

One afternoon, Shonda made a round of calls from her living room. A bootlegged copy of the movie “The Purge” played in the background. The black window curtains were pulled shut. Eric’s old girlfriend, Kala Moss, answered the phone.

 

“What have you been hearing?” Shonda asked.

 

“I ain’t been hearing nothing,” the 18-year-old said.

 

When she hung up, Shonda sighed, grit her teeth.

 

People had to make an exception this time, she thought. It was Eric. People had to talk just this once.

 

She went to the jail to talk to a gang member who told her the plot ran deep, but also said they would never say that in court. She questioned Eric’s friends outside the gang. One boy cut his hair and threw away his cellphone because he was so scared he would be found by either the police or the gang if he talked. She logged into Eric’s old Facebook account and researched his friends. She called people who lived on Foust Street.

 

There was a woman she thought might have seen Eric the night he died, a female gang member. So Shonda drove to her house to confront her. Shonda screamed at the graying woman covered in tattoos.

 

Shonda told her she was going to find out what happened, that someone was going to be held responsible. The woman shared a little but said she could never be a court witness.

 

Eric had a lot of money that night and hadn’t shared it with his friends, the woman told Shonda. He didn’t have his gun because he had loaned it to someone who had left to sell drugs. A car pulled up and honked for him to come outside, she said, and Eric grabbed her hand.

 

Sis, I don’t want to go.

 

They did the brother’s handshake, the woman said.

 

Then, he was gone.

 

Shonda couldn’t believe she heard the words. In the moment, she thought she had been wrong, about everyone. The police would solve the case. A witness would speak. Her son’s death would matter.

 

Then the defense attorney started cross-examination, and a pit formed in her stomach.

 

The attorney pointed out that the teen had changed his story. At first, the witness said he talked to Tone Tone at his home. Then he said he talked to Tone Tone at his school.

 

The attorney also questioned his motivation. Wasn’t the family angry at Tone Tone for leaving Teaira while pregnant, for finding another girlfriend? Hamilton County Sessions Court Judge Clarence Shattuck took it all in before he spoke.

 

There was probable cause, he said. So he would pass it on to the grand jury. But the case had weaknesses. So he lowered Tone Tone’s bond from $900,000 to $250,000. With a bondsman, it would cost $25,000 or less to get him released from jail.

 

The witness leaned in to his mother. “I guess I’ll have to move.”

 

Tone Tone smiled.

 

As everyone left the courtroom, Shonda was sent into a side room by the court officer so that she wouldn’t run into Tone Tone’s family. And when the door closed, she wept.

 

Give me a paper, she said. “I am going to write the judge a letter.”

 

She collapsed in a chair.

“He’s going to get back out.”