2 teens charged as adults for murder of 13-year-old boy

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- A pair of 15- and 17-year-old boys are charged as adults with the murder of a 13-year-old Louisville boy, according to court records obtained by WDRB News.

Fifteen-year-old Brad Watkins and Daniel Wallace, who turned 17 this week, are due in court Wednesday morning to answer to murder charges related to the death of 13-year-old DaViawn Blackmon, who was shot in the head and left for dead in an alley near Broadway and 38th Street on June 26.

"It's nothing like losing a 13-year-old child," Blackmon's mother, Dawn Brown, said Friday. "Nobody should have to bury a 13-year-old child. I don't wish that on my worst enemy."

The suspects are familiar faces to Brown. She said one went to school with her son and the other he knew from community programming.

"They had come to my house several times, threatening my son," Brown said. "I called the police on them numerous, numerous, numerous times."

Brown previously said she knew she was in a battle with the streets for her son. The youngest of seven, Blackmon liked cars and loved to laugh.

But relatives said he was being pulled toward gang life.

The arrest citation for Wallace and Watkins said the Blackmon murder was caught on camera and that another person, who was with the victim, ran from the scene with the suspects shooting at him.

It's unclear if that person was hit, but the narrative in the citation may provide motive on what happened that night.

According to the report, Watkins admitted to pulling the trigger, telling police "you have to kill witnesses if they observe a murder."

"Young people don't do this on their own," said Brown. "They're driven to do things like this. They're directed to do things like this."

Metro government records show at least 14 juveniles have been killed in Louisville this year, seven since Blackmon's death. Among them, his 12-year-old friend, Justin Johnson, killed the day after Blackmon.

Because of the rise in youth violence, city leaders are trying multiple crime reduction, intervention, and right-turn programs in an effort to stem the tide of violence. The latest, a push to start using an old ban on masking in public.

"We have a bunch of young people, 16 to 24, involved in violent crime that are concealing their identity," LMPD Chief Paul Humphrey said previously.

Brown first spoke to WDRB News in July, following her son's death, wearing a ski mask at the start of the interview to prove a point.

"So that I could look like all the other little boys out here," she said. "Anybody that has a ski mask on and in 90 degree weather, something's not right."

They're the kind of masks Brown said she confiscated from her son, because she said she knew something wasn't right.

Louisville's mask ordinance has been on the books since the 1980s. City leaders said it was passed as a way to unmask the KKK. But those laws have gone dormant, especially in light of the coronavirus pandemic when more people started masking for their health.

Friday evening, Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg's office said Metro Government will introduce a revised public masking ordinance next week, designed to protect health and public safety. But there are concerns.

"It's very fluid to interpretation and it's at a time when we're operating in a very low-trust environment in Louisville right now with LMPD," Amber Duke, executive director of the ACLU of Kentucky, said. "I think there are a lot of questions we'd like to see answered around the process, procedure and how is this going to be enforced equitably."

Metro Council will host a special public safety committee meeting on the revisions to the masking rules in the city next Wednesday, Oct. 30, at 5 p.m. If you can't attend in person, questions, comments and concerns can be submitted online by clicking here.

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