In early 2019 I visited the cemetery where Jorell was buried. It was my first time there since his funeral.
Some people find cemeteries depressing, but I find them calming, particularly the North County cluster of graveyards along St. Charles Rock Road. They’re huge green spaces within bustling residential areas, bastions of quietude where no one will bother you.
The headstone engravings reflect the decedents’ quirky personalities, and tokens left by loved ones run the gamut from flower bouquets to booze bottles to—as I saw one Thanksgiving—a papier-mâché turkey. In this rapidly changing part of the county, the cemeteries evoke a feeling of permanence, especially the old mausoleums, with their exquisite stone and stained glass craftsmanship.
Jorell is buried at Laurel Hill Memorial Gardens, a nearly hundred-year-old graveyard in Pagedale, the municipality where my suspect #1, Chauncey James, happens to be from. It’s well trafficked, not just by grieving widows but by young men who have lost friends. When I pulled in I saw someone had spray-painted the word Crypdale on the road, apparently to shout out a local gang.
I spoke with the cemetery’s twenty-two-year-old operator, Riley, whose family has been in the business for generations. His mother, who died when he was young, is buried in his uncle’s cemetery in South County. He said that because of North County’s surging murder rate they were running out of space here. For that reason they were considering ending “containerless” burials. Riley lamented that they no longer offered bronze flower vases because they kept getting stolen from grave sites.
After reeling off a few other depressing aspects of the funeral business, he produced a paper map of the grounds and showed me where to find Jorell’s plot. I thanked him and walked across the road, past a children’s psychiatric hospital, arriving at a small, annexed burial area bordered by a mobile home park. I counted the rows until I arrived at Jorell’s patch of dirt, marked only by a small cross and a red ribbon.
What are you supposed to do at a gravesite? I hadn’t brought any flowers, so I just closed my eyes and tried to remember him; the things we’d done together, the times I’d been proud of him, the laughs we’d shared. After a few minutes I gave up. It felt absurd to be thinking like this.
I didn’t want to dwell on memories of Jorell—I wanted to be making new memories together.
I drove home frustrated. Ruminating on the past just didn’t feel therapeutic or productive. I didn’t want to sit around feeling sorry that Jorell had been killed, I wanted to be doing something about it.
Maybe I just feared dealing with my emotions. That’s what Anna suggested, and she probably had a point. I’m far from the only man with this problem, and I understand the potential negative ramifications of failing to drill down on my feelings. By denying my emotional state, I risked making unconscious decisions. As I worked my investigation, I couldn’t risk any blind spots. I needed to see the world clearly, starting with myself. I needed to understand how Jorell’s death affected me, and what these feelings were causing me to do. It’s like I was traveling a dark highway with my eyes half closed, risking losing my bearings and getting lost.
And yet it was growing exceedingly difficult for me to navigate my feelings. For one thing, I worried about wasting time. The longer his murder remained unsolved, the more likely it would remain so, I thought.
My mind kept tracking back to his case and what I needed to do next.
Soon after visiting the cemetery I decided to get in touch with Jorell’s sister Rece. We’d spoken sporadically but had never done a full-length interview. That needed to change. She was close to her younger brother in age and one of his best friends, privy to certain aspects of his life that were off-limits to others. She said she’d be happy to talk, and so one morning in March 2019, I visited her apartment.
From the highway I drove north on West Florissant Avenue, where the Michael Brown unrest had taken place five years earlier. Few visible scars remained: the burned shops had been rebuilt, or in some cases demolished. Despite the promises of revitalization, West Florissant Avenue remained a bleak expanse of fast food restaurants, beauty supply stores, and predatory loan enterprises. There were empty parking lots as far as the eye could see. Commuters raced down the four-lane road. Pedestrians cowered on stretches of sidewalk that were sometimes not ADA compliant, and the few who dared ride bikes took their lives into their hands.
I approached Canfield Drive, the street where Brown was killed. I turned right at a sign for an abandoned car wash, which featured an anachronistic cartoon chauffeur holding a bucket and a towel. Arriving a few minutes before my scheduled meeting with Rece, I stopped to examine the memorial plaque to Brown, laid into a sidewalk and surrounded by roses and a teddy bear. “In Memory of Michael O.D. Brown, May 20, 1996-August 9, 2014,” it read. “He’d like the tears of those who grieve to dry before the sun of happy memories that he left behind when life was done.”
This memorial had become a tourist destination of sorts, and a place where TV newscasters reported live on the anniversaries of his death. But on most days it simply faded into the landscape of this low-income neighborhood. Right now people were heading to work, walking to the bus stop, or rumbling past in pickups.
Behind Brown’s plaque was a little park on a bluff. Its walking path cut through dense woods and featured remains of those ’70s-era fitness stations—for doing pull-ups or sit-ups—from back before gyms were popular. No one walked the path on this chilly morning, though muddy tire tracks indicated someone had recently taken a joyride.
Just across the street was Rece’s apartment complex, called Canfield Green, where she moved not long after Brown’s death. (In 2021 it was renamed Pleasant View Gardens.) She now resided only a hundred yards or so from where he was killed. The proximity to this historic spot was neither draw nor deterrent for her; it was simply preferable to other nearby subsidized housing options, like the Park Ridge apartments, her previous home, which had been burgled four times in one year, she said. Fortunately she was never home when it happened, but intruders took just about everything: TVs, DVD players, baby clothes, even Pampers. These types of break-ins are commonplace in southeast Ferguson, where five low-income apartment complexes (including Canfield Green and Park Ridge) account for 25 percent of the city’s violent crimes. They’re the kinds of places where no one bothers to sweep up the shell casings.
“You still hear gunshots outside—at night, in the morning—but it’s actually nice here. It ain’t bother me yet,” Rece said, after I entered the apartment. We sat down on a brown sectional sofa; clothes were scattered on the floor, and the bathroom counters were piled high with wigs and hair extensions. These were inventory for her hair-styling business, a side gig from her main job as a manager at a fast-food spot called London’s Wing House.
Rece is the most social of the Cleveland children, constantly chatting on her phone, texting, and posting on social media. Though she asked me not to print her real name, she said she got her nickname because her mother ate Reese’s Pieces throughout her pregnancy. “They’re not my favorite, though,” she added with a laugh. “That’s weird to people.”
Her boyfriend had lived here until recently, but now her sister Peaches was staying here and helping out with Rece’s four-year-old son. Rece and Peaches shared both of the same parents as Jorell, giving them a special bond.
“He had a big heart,” Rece said. “He was very sweet. He would do little simple stuff. Like, when I was in the hospital after I had my baby, and I had to have surgery, he brought a card and a teddy bear.”
Rece was nine months pregnant when Michael Brown was killed. During the unrest she hunkered down inside the Cleveland house in Ferguson, before going to the hospital to give birth just a few days later. Soon after coming home with her son, however, Rece decided to move out. A bad crowd had begun gathering there. “They’d have guns toting,” she said. Making matters worse, Jorell was getting caught up in it. “They was popping pills—like Xanax.” She didn’t know that Jorell was using heroin, she said, but it was all too much. “I didn’t want to have all that around my baby, so we moved out.”
She was glad to have departed, but she no longer saw Jorell as often. When he was killed she took it as hard as anyone, and she has worked to keep his memory alive. Every year Rece and the Cleveland family go down to Arkansas to celebrate his birthday, March 15, which coincides with a festival in their hometown Dumas called the Hood-Nic, a party that raises money for education.
Rece showed me an oversize, handmade birthday card on her wall, in honor of what would have been Jorell’s twenty-first birthday. It included a glossy picture of him looking fit in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. Below that a couple dozen friends and family members had signed and offered well-wishes to Jorell, almost all of them using the phrase “Happy C-Day.”
From my reporting on gangland Los Angeles, I knew exactly what this meant. Members of the Crips don’t like to use the letter “B,” as it’s associated with their archrivals the Bloods. And so, “Happy B-Day” becomes “Happy C-Day.”
I didn’t ask Rece about it, but on the drive home I contemplated the possibility that Jorell was a gang member. It was hard to believe. He was too independent, I thought. Too free-thinking. But—yet again—I was being naive.
When Jorell’s family moved to Ferguson in 2006 he was a scrawny nine-year-old kid. He was cute in that “pat you on the head” kind of way, and people often mistook him as younger than he actually was. As he grew older he got tired of this treatment. He wanted to be one of the big dogs.
The focus of his world grew increasingly beyond his family and his community at school, and he began spending time with the guys on his block. To the uninitiated his street, Oak Avenue, appeared like any other street. But by Jorell’s teen years it had become Crips territory. Guys often wore blue clothes, hats, and bandanas; St. Louis Blues hockey paraphernalia was popular. On the other hand, in areas representing the Bloods—like Kinloch, for example—Cardinals’ baseball gear was preferred.
It turns out the Crips and Bloods affiliations were imported directly from Los Angeles, circa the 1980s and ’90s. Southern California gangbangers moved out here to sell drugs, attempting to expand their influence beyond oversaturated LA markets, including Compton. This trend was documented in rap songs like Ice Cube’s 1991 track “My Summer Vacation,” in which the drug-dealing narrator heads east.
Catch a flight to St. Louis
That’s cool, cause nobody knew us
These dealers had limited success; in many cases the locals fought back and the Los Angeles affiliates were forced to retreat back home, leaving only their gang affiliations behind.
Yet there are differences between Los Angeles and St. Louis gangbanging. While every block in some parts of South LA have been carved out by rival gangs—and crossing the wrong street in the wrong colors can bring trouble—there’s more crossover in St. Louis. Local gang members often maintain friends in other sets, and you don’t hear about people being killed for colors.
As for Jorell, it soon became clear to me that he was, indeed, a Crip. But Mike Fuller said gang membership wasn’t a particularly important aspect of his life. He joined because “everybody from Oak are Crips, and he liked the color blue,” Mike said. He added that he didn’t believe Jorell had been “jumped in”—beaten as part of an initiation ritual—or anything like that.
More than anything, Jorell identified as a member of the Oak Boys, a clique representing Jorell’s block. Their membership overlapped with the Crips, though not everyone joined both. The Oak Boys were teens and twenty-somethings who hung out at Oak Park, located near the Cleveland house. On this sprawling expanse of grass—dotted by playground equipment, basketball courts, and soccer fields—the guys could be found listening to music, comparing guns, or just chewing the fat.
Some Oak Boys sold weed or harder drugs. They had a common enemy in a rival Kinloch gang nearby, but the Oak Boys weren’t particularly organized. They were mostly just a group of directionless kids who had come up together in the same crummy schools. The workforce didn’t have much use for them, so they banded together for safety and camaraderie, and to perhaps make a little money. “A lot of us don’t get along 100 percent of the time, but when it’s needed, we come together,” Jorell’s friend Big Ant told me.
Big Ant is a member of the Oak Boys. He’s a corpulent, affable neighborhood presence who’d known Jorell since he was young. I’d met him only a couple of times in passing, but he was glad to discuss Jorell’s life. He said that Jorell certainly had a temper, but he could also be funny. “He was a silly dude, man,” Big Ant said. “Anybody that can stand in there with me and crack jokes all day, that’s my type of person.” Big Ant also offered key insight into Jorell’s trajectory within the clique, and how it affected the way he saw himself.
As Big Ant described it, when he was young Jorell watched the Oak Boys from afar, while playing basketball or riding his dad’s four-wheeler in the park. He was curious about them, but intimidated.
Eventually he worked up the courage to talk with them. At first, they mocked his youth and small stature. “We do all the younger fellas like that, trying to hang with the big fellas, but you ain’t old enough yet,” said Big Ant.
Before long he found his way into the fold. At first he was thrilled. But though inclusion had its privileges…it also had its pitfalls.
The Oak Boys began calling him Lajo—Little Joe—after his father Joe, and because of his size. This light hazing was normal, but Jorell didn’t tolerate being pushed around much. He gave as good as he took. Very quickly he began to demand respect, and the guys admired how he couldn’t be intimidated. “Somebody like Jorell, he’s gonna stand his ground,” said Big Ant.
When I started high school I admired the upperclassmen guys, seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds with licenses and cars, who dated pretty girls and had access to weed and booze. They seemed to have it all figured out. Jorell looked up to the older Oak Boys in this same way. They were bigger, they had swagger, they had guns.
Those older boys I used to idolize? I don’t anymore. Many of them remain caught up in the same bad habits and vainglorious pursuits from high school. Turns out they didn’t really have it all figured out. And neither did the Oak Boys. They were trapped in a system that penalized anyone who played by the rules and rewarded those who lived cynically. They moved in a haze of uncertainty, fear, and mistrust.
And though the burnouts from my high school are still mostly around, many of the Oak Boys are now in prison. Or dead. Many suffer undiagnosed PTSD.
Jorell bonded with the Oak Boys through hip-hop. They enjoyed Southern rappers like Gucci Mane and Lil Boosie, and many Oak Boys were also aspiring MCs themselves. As far back as 2008 they’d been uploading videos to YouTube, showing off their handguns, rolls of cash, and ziplock bags of drugs. They shouted out incarcerated members of their crew and paid allegiance to “Oak Bloccc.”
If you want the pants scared off you, watch a St. Louis rap video. Hometown heroes Nelly and Huey once dominated rotation with videos filled with buxom women and sparkling jewels, but those days are long gone.
Often set in overgrown parts of North County, today’s videos document chilling aspects of street life. Teenage rappers prowl dark streets brandishing firearms. Their crews pass around blunts or Styrofoam cups of codeine-promethazine cough syrup. Everyone’s packed to the gills, and their wild parties seem on the verge of devolving into crime scenes. In one video a local rapper called 30 Deep Grimeyy (named for the number of crewmates he says he travels with) carries an AR pistol in one hand and a pair of street signs in the other; the intersection displayed on the signs shows it’s been stolen from a rival gang’s territory.
The St. Louis scene is populated by compelling and intriguing characters, like Luh Half, a little person with a huge following, and standout female rapper Jai Ktchnz. Videos throughout the scene are technically sophisticated, made on low budgets but with high production values, which creates an unnerving verité quality. Nobody doubts that these guns are real, and they’re usually pointed directly at the camera. One wonders: Aren’t they worried about the police? It turns out that they should be. In fact, Baltimore cops used the drugs and guns displayed in the video of a rapper called Young Moose as probable cause for a raid in 2014, leading to his arrest. Two years earlier, in rapper Lil Boosie’s murder trial in Baton Rouge, prosecutors used his lyrics against him as evidence, though he was ultimately acquitted.
Ice Cube’s 1991 track “My Summer Vacation” was a morality tale; in the end, the LA dealer is put away for life. But the St. Louis rappers’ songs hew closer to the present-day reality of a rotted criminal justice system. Their characters escape prosecution, and their enemies perish.
Using similarly bleak imagery, the Oak Boys hoped to be the next breakout group from the St. Louis area. Their song “Out the Mud” discusses being marginalized by society, while their video for “Monster” focuses on their outlandish arsenal, featuring AR-15 rifles about three feet long, semiautomatic pistols, and a 12-gauge pump shotgun. Some of the guns are customized with exotic accoutrements.
To me these videos are terrifying, but Jorell was captivated by it all. He did a little rapping himself, and though he was too shy to perform for me or his friends, he was on hand for the “Monster” video shoot. Fresh off a shift at Popeyes, he brought a batch of fried chicken to the set in a garbage bag. They were so happy with this gift that they filmed the delivery and put Jorell in the video. He was thrilled by his fifteen seconds of fame.
Over time, many Oak Boys developed real love for Jorell. An older member of the clique named Calvin took him under his wing. Big Ant got Jorell’s name tattooed on his left hand and wore a “Lajo” memorial T-shirt in a video, after his death.
But not everyone embraced the young newcomer. An Oak Boy named Ricky Watkins chastised Jorell regularly. Because of their increasingly confrontational relationship, I came to consider Watkins suspect #3 in my investigation, the third and final person I believed could have killed Jorell.
Sharply dressed, with bright brown eyes and a drooping goatee, Watkins was five years older than Jorell, and taller. He shared his name with his father, a Kinloch native.
Ricky Watkins Sr. did time for crack cocaine dealing and armed criminal action in his day, after shooting a man he believed was a police informant. Just six months before Watkins’s birth, Ricky Sr. was involved in a strange domestic incident in Kinloch, involving the mother of two of his children and his own mother, which culminated in police finding a sawed-off shotgun in a barbeque pit. A St. Louis County police investigator sought to charge Ricky Sr. with assault and burglary, but could not “due to lack of victim cooperation.”
This was the world Watkins was born into. Though he graduated from high school and attended some college, like his father he faced trouble with the law. In August 2016, just ten days before Jorell’s death, he was arrested after being caught by police with an unlicensed Springfield Armory semiautomatic pistol. Like many of his contemporaries he posed for social media photos with firearms, sometimes color coordinating his gun with his outfit. He was never convicted of a violent crime, but many in the neighborhood feared him. Iesha warned Jorell against hanging out with him.
From the start, Joe Cleveland didn’t trust him. From what he understood, it was Watkins who drove a wedge between Jorell and his former friend Lil Glen—the guy who once slept over at the Cleveland house, but then later stole guns from the family and shot Joe in the back. Further, Joe’s kids told him, Watkins spent his time menacing people and showing off his .38 at Oak Park. And so one day Joe got into his truck and drove down to the park to set a few things straight.
“I live here,” he told Watkins, in front of Watkins’s friends. “I ain’t going nowhere. I pay taxes on this park, and my kids are gonna play here. They better be safe.”
Joe warned Watkins against trying anything. He said he’d learned where Watkins kept his .38 and its three bullets—under the garbage can belonging to a household adjacent to the park.
“I better not have to come back down here on account of your stupidness,” Joe concluded.
Watkins didn’t take kindly to Joe’s warning. He made an aggressive move, “like he wanted to walk up to my truck,” Joe said.
“I pulled out my .44 and said, ‘No, you ain’t going to walk up to my truck,’” Joe recalled. “I had no more problems out of him after that.”
Some portrayed Ricky Watkins as the bad guy, but he had deep scars of his own. Traumatized by the death of a beloved uncle in 2013, he wrote dark status updates on his Facebook page, prophesying his own death and worrying about his children.
He was also a big flirt. “Every time he saw me, he’d try to talk to me,” said Jorell’s sister Rece. He could really turn up the charm when he wanted to. “Get him mad, it might turn bad, but other than that, he’s a funny guy,” said Big Ant.
Added Watkins’s friend Nett: “He was super funny—always cracking jokes, always laughing, playing. It’s just that, when he get in his little ways, he can be a little disrespectful. He didn’t know when to stop.”
Watkins could lose his cool over the littlest slight, people said.
Kind of like Jorell.
Since Mike and Montrel were identical twins, people often got them confused. This happened one afternoon at R&R Mini Mart & Liquor, around 2016, though no one seems sure exactly when. This was the same bodega near the Cleveland house where Jorell had gotten into an altercation in the summer of 2016 with the wife of suspect #1, Chauncey James. This time, Montrel was inside the store when he was approached by Ricky Watkins. “What up, fat ass?” Watkins said.
This took Montrel aback, since he didn’t know Watkins at all. It turns out Watkins thought Montrel was Mike, whom he knew from the neighborhood. He meant his comment as a joke.
Mike is the more easygoing twin; Montrel has a shorter fuse. Montrel immediately got his back up. “Who the fuck is you?” he responded. They went back and forth for a minute or so, growing increasingly inflamed.
Watkins left the store in a huff. Mike, who was waiting in Montrel’s car, saw Watkins from the parking lot. He watched as Watkins retrieved his gun from his own car, and then posted up next to the outdoor refrigerated case holding ice for sale, near the bodega’s entrance. He was lying in wait for Montrel.
Mike exited the car to try to defuse the situation. He approached Watkins by the icebox.
Watkins was confused. “How did you come out of the store that fast?”
“That’s my twin brother,” Mike explained. As Watkins shook his head in disbelief, Mike insisted it was all just a misunderstanding and asked him to spare his brother.
Just then Montrel emerged from the store, ready to fight. Mike grabbed him and hustled him into the car. “Go to the crib,” Mike told Montrel. “Go!”
Montrel started the car and drove toward the Cleveland house, but he didn’t understand the urgency. “Why are we running from this guy? It’s 1:30 in the afternoon. You think he’s going to shoot me at this time of day?”
As they parked the car in the Cleveland driveway, Mike insisted that, yes, Ricky Watkins was capable of something like that. As if to make Mike’s point, Watkins roared past them on Oak Avenue at that very moment, going perhaps forty or fifty down the residential street. As Mike and Montrel ran into the house, Watkins realized he’d passed them. “Then he did a U-turn—you could hear his tires and everything—and turned back around,” Montrel said.
Shortly thereafter, Mike and Montrel heard a cascade of gunshots. “He was just shooting in the air, trying to show that, ‘I ain’t playing,’” Montrel said. “Just trying to show out.”
Nothing more came of the incident. I couldn’t find a police report about it. Both Fuller brothers found it a shocking display of aggression and believed it showed that Watkins was capable of much worse.
“That man is crazy,” said Montrel.
Ricky Watkins’s relationship with Jorell was often civil. When the crew would hang out at Oak Park, he and Jorell frequently got along, comparing the latest guns in their collections. “One minute they was cool. One minute they wasn’t,” said Jorell’s sister Rece.
One morning not long before Jorell’s death the Oak Boys were at the park when, suddenly, cops pulled up. Perhaps summoned by a concerned neighbor who saw their guns, the police jumped out of their cars. The Oak Boys immediately scattered, running in all directions as the cops gave chase.
As Jorell described it to Mike, he found his way into a nearby vacant house. Watkins followed right after him. Once inside the home Watkins panicked, worried the police would bust him for his unlicensed gun. In a frenzied effort to hide it, he threw it down a laundry chute, and it fell into the basement.
Ultimately the police didn’t catch up to them, or anyone else in the crew. Once it became clear the cops had moved on, Watkins awkwardly requested Jorell’s assistance in retrieving his gun.
“Jorell, can you help me get it out?” he asked.
“Man, you don’t really like me,” Jorell responded. “Why should I help you? Every time I’m around, you try to embarrass me.” In the end, however, Jorell came to Watkins’s aid, helping him retrieve the firearm out of the basement. Jorell came home and told the story to Mike, who applauded him for his peacemaking actions.
But mistrust between the two persisted. Watkins mocked Jorell for hanging around with his girlfriend Danielle’s brother. “Why you with this white boy?” Watkins would ask him, implying that Danielle’s brother might be working with the police. “Don’t be bringing white boys over here in the neighborhood. You don’t know what we got going on.” (I never encountered Watkins myself, and in fact I was almost universally accepted by Jorell’s friends. I never heard of Jorell receiving any teasing for being a “Little.”)
Jorell’s friend Malon said things got extremely heated between Jorell and Watkins on two or three occasions. “They always used to have words, and always used to get into it, and pull guns out on each other,” he said. One time at Oak Park things got particularly hairy. Malon doesn’t recall the date, or what the specific argument entailed, but “they got into it about something.”
Pulling out his gun, Watkins declared, “I ain’t worried about nothing. I got my gun on me.”
Jorell responded by producing his own firearm. “I ain’t worried about nothing either,” he responded.
“They ended up pointing them at each other,” Malon said. “They had words, and we calmed it all down.”