Kennewick teen’s unsolved murder among 1,200 youth deaths nationwide

Eight Tri-City murders in five years.

All involving kids.

Some were linked to gang warfare or illegal drugs. At least one by an obsessed lover. The reasons behind the others are less clear.

Sometimes the youth were the perpetrators, and other times the victims.

But in each case, they involved a gun and children ranging from age 3 to 18.

Kennewick’s Hunter Black is featured among the collection of short portraits documenting the nearly 1,200 young people killed in shootings in the past year in the United States.

“He had a warm smile and golden brown hair that shone bright under the sun,” said the vignette about Black, written by 16-year-old journalist Nadia Ngom. “He was a radiant and sociable soul. He was somebody’s ‘sweet sunshine.’”

Black, 18, was ambushed inside his home early Oct. 26 by two masked attackers and shot once in the chest with a shotgun. His pregnant girlfriend was home but not hurt.

His death remains unsolved.

Tracking gun violence

The project, “Since Parkland,” was created out of a partnership between the Miami Herald, its parent company McClatchy and The Trace, a nonprofit news organization that tracks gun violence.

It was spurred by the Feb. 14, 2018, massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., where 17 students and staff members were killed and 17 others injured.

The statistics were pulled from the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit research group that gathers information from media sources on shooting incidents and other gun-related violence.

National database reflects all ages

While Black was the only teen murdered in our area since Valentine’s Day 2018, the national database shows how frequently guns play a role in different crimes involving all ages.

The entries also include unintentional gunshots, as well as suicides.

In all, Benton and Franklin counties had 28 gun incidents involving kids in the past five years, shows the Gun Violence Archive. The database goes back to January 2014.

Pasco had the most gun incidents with 11, followed by nine in Kennewick.

Richland had three, Prosser and Connell had two each and West Richland one.

The youngest victim was 3-year-old Luis Lopez-Cruz, who died with his mother in July 2015. The killer shot both of them, then set fire to a car with the two inside and left it burning in a north Franklin County ravine.

In June 2014, Kennewick sixth-grader Ethan Austin killed his 16-year-old sister, Kaitlin Austin, and then turned the gun on himself.

Police reports said Ethan, 12, was infatuated with guns and first-person shooter video games, but investigators found there were few warning signs of what was to come.

In another incident, a security officer at Pasco’s Columbia Basin College prevented a possible campus shooting in May 2018.

Jose Amezola, 18, had planned a shooting on the campus, and hid a disassembled .410 gauge shotgun next to a flagpole and a backpack with ammunition in a separate building, police reports show. No one was injured.

Amezola, who wasn’t a CBC student, was high on drugs when confronted. His case recently was dismissed and he entered into a felony diversion program in a lower court.

The Gun Violence Archive also shows that a 13-year-old boy took a loaded 9 mm gun to Prosser’s Housel Middle School in November 2015.

The boy told investigators it was for protection against several high school students, and he didn’t intend to shoot classmates or teachers.

Teens and guns

The incidents include a high number of drive-by shootings and “shootouts.”

Two cousins, ages 13 and 14, are suspects in two holiday shootings in the Tri-Cities.

Investigators suspect they were directed by two adult relatives to shoot a Fourth of July reveler while Howard Amon Park was crowded with hundreds of families and friends.

Then over Labor Day weekend, the teens are accused of shooting several shots in a Pasco neighborhood, hitting two apartment doors in a four-plex and a parked car.

In a separate case, a 16-year-old Pasco boy was caught with a pistol on July 4 near Memorial Park. He reportedly told police he had no intention of using the gun at the holiday parade.

Some teen killers are reflected in the database, including 17-year-old Pedro Cadenas and 18-year-old DeShawn Anderson, who also was convicted of an earlier drive-by shooting that wounded four.

It also shows teens — like 15-year-old Abraham Barajas, 17-year-old Jaden F. Quintero and 18-year-old Fernando Gonzalez — who originally were charged with murder, but pleaded guilty to lesser charges.

In the Quintero case, older brother Nathan T. Quintero took responsibility for recklessly causing the death of George Garcia Thacker, 18, in a shooting near the cable bridge.

The database is comprehensive, but it often culls information from initial media reports when law enforcement haven’t yet identified the victims and who is responsible.

So a number of reports for a drive-by shooting, brandishing a gun or recovered stolen property might not be linked in the database to a particular age group, even though an arrest was made and charges filed.

Or, like in the case of the August 2014 shooting deaths of three young Pasco adults in a Benton County corn field, the incident report notes that someone died and that one of the victims was nearly nine months pregnant, but the search results show a “0” for the number killed.

‘Couldn’t wait to be a father’

Very little has been said about the suspects in the fatal shooting of Hunter Black.

Kennewick police believe Black was targeted by the two men who broke into his South Yelm Street home. Black and his girlfriend, Cynarra Scott, were woken up by the assailants just before 2:30 a.m.

Investigators still are awaiting test results on evidence collected in the home and sent to the state crime lab.

Scott, who’d been dating Black for 11 months, had announced Oct. 15 on Instagram that she was eight weeks pregnant with a “little peanut.”

She said they couldn’t be more excited “to welcome this amazing blessing into our lives.”

In December, more than five weeks after her boyfriend was killed, Scott briefly talked about Black in a Facebook message to a Herald reporter.

“He was the most perfect person you’d have ever met. So generous and kind. His eyes showed how open his heart was,” Scott wrote.

“He has struggled so much in his lifetime. We finally felt like we were gonna make it and that things were looking up. We had a baby on the way and Hunter couldn’t wait to be a father,” she added.

“Hunter is so tremendously talented and his mind is so beautiful. There’s so many things I could say and I’d love to go on.”

Scott is expecting a son this May. A GoFundMe account was established after Black’s death to support his girlfriend and child.