Malcolm Mency decided to walk home from work Sunday to save his girlfriend the mile-long drive to pick him up.
"Don't, that's stupid," Labreonna Moore, 19, told him. "He said, 'I know. I love you, and I'll call you when I get home.'"
Minutes passed and Mency never called. Then Moore's phone rang with news: "Malcolm got shot."
Mency — an 18-year-old black man — was probably shot by a Latino gang member who assumed he was a rival, said Los Angeles County Sheriff's Sgt. Howard Cooper.
"It's the kind of story you hate ... where you have a person who was headed in the right direction," Cooper said. "He was simply walking home."
Mency, a new father to 1-month-old Malcolm Jr., got off work at Sonic Burger about two hours early. He was shot around the corner from his house in an unincorporated section of Duarte.
"Whoever did this is truly a coward. They shot him in the back," said Shalonda Lockhart, 29, the oldest of his nine siblings. "He was doing everything right. He was so determined to be the best father he could be. He was so excited."
Moore, who lives about a block from Mency's house, said she heard the gunshots the night he was killed. At first, she thought it was fireworks, until her calls to his phone went unanswered.
She ran down Broderick Avenue after his family called her. An ambulance had already rushed him away; his blood stained the sidewalk.
On Monday morning, she recalled their plans for Christmas. She planned to bring Malcolm Jr. — whom Mency liked to call "M2" — to spend the night before at Mency's house.
"He wanted to wake up with his family and be the first thing he sees on Christmas morning," she said, looking at her son, asleep in a stroller. "He got robbed of the opportunity."
The couple met at Duarte High School. He was a receiver on the football team, and Moore gave water to players during practice. He asked her out, but she was afraid to say yes, she recalled Monday at the site of his shooting.
"Then I surrendered," she said with a tearful laugh.
Mency's shooting is the type of incident that one 45-year resident said happens all too often in this section of Duarte, near the Monrovia border.
"It seems like they want to hurt the other side's family," said the neighbor, looking at Mency's candlelight vigil from his front yard. He asked to have his name withheld out of fear of retaliation by local gangs.
"It always seems to happen around the holidays," he said.
The neighbor said he warned a lot of local kids to stay out of trouble, but Mency "was about the only one who listened. He was a good kid who was trying to do something with his life."
Mency's family said he had graduated from high school in three years and was completing a medical internship. He hoped to become a nurse.
Just hours after Mency was shot, Sheriff's Department officials say a young Latino man was shot and wounded by two black men who were seen leaving in a dark vehicle. Authorities believe the two men were gang members, and that the second shooting could have been the result of a "ping-pong effect" of retaliatory shootings among rival black and Latino gangs, Cooper said.
The description of Mency's shooter is vague, Cooper said. He is described as Latino, in his 20s, with a shaved head.
No weapon was recovered at the scene and no bullet casings were found.
"We have nothing," Cooper said.
Anyone with information about Mency's killing is asked to call the Sheriff's Department homicide bureau at (323) 890-5500 or the sheriff's Temple Station at (626) 285-7171. Anonymous tips can be submitted to Crime Stoppers at (800) 222-8477.
joseph.serna@latimes.com
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