Family mourns teen killed in double-homicide. ‘I was trying to get him away from here.’
Teraye Preston’s friends and family remember a teenage boy who liked to draw, got competitive when he played video games, and loved his family.
On Tuesday afternoon, Preston, 18, was killed in a shooting in Gulfport that also killed 19-year-old Juan Reginald Harvey, Jr. Their deaths have reignited a long-running conversation on the Coast about how to stop the gun violence that has injured and killed so many teenagers in recent years.
On Thursday evening, about 100 of Preston’s family and friends gathered at the Courthouse Road Pier to release balloons in his memory, all black and blue, his favorite colors.
“He was kind spirited, loving, loved his family,” said his grandmother, Eula Clayton. “A little misguided, but just a good hearted person.”
When he was living with her a few years ago, she noticed how well he drew, and bought him a drawing pad to support his talent, which seemed to come from nowhere.
“He could look at a picture of a car and draw it, down to the tires and the rims,” she remembered.
His mother, Kendrick Tillman, remembered the way he would call her name: “Ma.” When she hugged and kissed him on his way out of the house, he would tell her, “Mama, you doing too much.”
Facebook live and a phone call
For the last several years, Preston and two of his younger brothers, ages 11 and 13, had been living with their older sister, Raven Holmes, in Orange Grove.
Holmes said her family members, including some of Preston’s little brothers, first learned he had been involved in Tuesday’s shooting through a Facebook Live that was recorded at the scene. People in the video brought up his name.
Holmes got a call from her sister, who said Preston had been shot and she needed to get to the hospital as soon as possible. On her way, she got notifications from people tagging her in the Facebook Live video, “over and over again.”
When she got to the hospital, she learned that her brother had died soon after he got there. He had been shot twice and lost too much blood.
Holmes said she doesn’t know Harvey Jr., and she and her family have no idea what led to Tuesday’s shooting.
On Thursday, Gulfport Police Department spokesman Sgt. Jason DuCré said the investigation was “still brand new” and he had no updates.
Mississippi’s gun violence kills teenagers
Before Preston and Harvey were killed, at least two other Coast teenagers had died in shootings in 2021: 19-year-old Caleb Gabriel Lett of Moss Point and 19-year-old Mickell Gordon of Ocean Springs. A 15-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl were charged in their deaths.
In 2020, according to a Sun Herald review of media coverage of shootings, at least nine teenagers in Harrison and Jackson counties were killed by guns. Some of the victims’ deaths were deemed the result of accidents or kids “playing with firearms.” Not all of the victims were identified by authorities because they were juveniles.
Of the 10 shooting deaths of teenagers in 2020 and 2021 where the Sun Herald reported the victim’s identity, eight victims were young Black men or boys.
In Gulfport, the deaths of Preston and Harvey have sparked anguished conversations about how to address the problem of gun violence among teenagers.
“This is plain out lawlessness, with a sense of unimaginable thought for human life,” said Jeffrey Hulum III, a non-profit leader and community advocate. “We’re beyond, ‘How did we get to this point?’ We gotta say, ‘How do we move on from this point?’”
Hulum, who is a gun rights supporter and gun owner himself, said he would like to see a robust gun buy-back program in Gulfport and amnesty for anyone who turns in an illegal firearm. That way, parents who discover their kids have guns can get rid of them safely.
Hulum said he also wants to see gun safety education in Mississippi schools, especially since it’s a constitutional carry state, where people can carry loaded handguns without a permit in most cases. It also has one of the country’s highest rates of gun ownership: about 55% of adults live in households with guns.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, Mississippi has the second-highest rate of firearms deaths in the country, behind only Alaska.
Hulum believes reducing gun deaths among teenagers will require getting guns off the streets, and that will take investment and attention from the government.
“This is not a Black community problem, this is a citywide problem and a state problem,” he said.
‘He was a good young man’
Pastor Earl Bankston has been “preaching on the street” since he found God about 15 years ago. Before that, he says, he was a “gang banger, drug dealer, you name it, I was doing it.”
He is also the cousin of Juan Reginald Harvey, Sr., the father of the other teenager killed alongside Preston on April 20.
Bankston said that he and Harvey Sr. preach together around the Coast, from Gaston Point and Orange Grove all the way to Pascagoula. Harvey Jr. would help them set up their speakers and microphones, and then break the equipment down when they were finished.
“He was a good young man, and he knew God, because he was right there with us while we were preaching,” Bankston said of Harvey Jr. “He listened.”
Bankston said that Harvey Sr. had lost an older son, TyJuan Johnson, to a shooting in 2017. Johnson was 17 at the time. An obituary listed Juan Harvey, Jr. as one of his six siblings.
“So this his daddy’s second time around with losing a child. To senseless mess.”
Long Live Teraye
Raven Holmes, Preston’s sister, said Preston was “a middle child,” the fifth of 19 siblings, caught between wanting the freedom the older kids got and the attention paid to the younger children. Holmes, now 28, grew up in her grandparents’ home, while Teraye and other siblings moved frequently.
When he lived with his grandmother Eula Clay, his cousin Dayqwan Tillman, now 25, lived there, too. Tillman said Clay was a jokester who loved his brothers and always wanted to win when they played Madden or Call of Duty.
Holmes enrolled him at North Gulfport Middle School when he moved in with her. But he was 16 years old and in the 7th grade, and didn’t feel comfortable there, so they decided he should join Job Corps instead.
Preston was a devoted older brother and deeply loyal to his friends. If a friend got in trouble at home and needed a place to stay, he would beg his sister, whom he called “Sis,” to let them stay at her house.
“He said, ‘I can’t leave my friend outside like that. If I got to, I’mma stay outside, too,’’’ Holmes said. “Sometimes I’d be mad and I’d be like, ‘OK, stay outside, whatever.’ He’d sneak in anyway. The little brothers would have let him in.”
Holmes said Preston was “finding himself.” She wanted her brother to leave Mississippi “and all this—depressing.” But he wouldn’t commit to making the move.
“Me and him had a plan, I was trying to get him away from here and I was trying to get him to Job Corps, but it just didn’t come fast enough,” she said.
As the sun was setting on Thursday, Preston’s siblings, along with other family and friends, stood in the Courthouse Road Pier parking lot along U.S. 90. They held blue mylar balloons that spelled “LL TERYE,” for Long Live Teraye, minus an A that had floated off earlier. They posed for a photograph. They let the balloons go.
This story was originally published April 23, 2021 at 10:35 AM.
