A D.C. man shot and killed while picking up medicine for his mother may have been mistaken for someone else, police believe.
Police found 23-year-old Brandon Gant shot inside his mother’s Toyota Corolla near the intersection of 18th Street and Minnesota Avenue in Southeast D.C. about 3:30 a.m. Sept. 6.
Police say a driver cut him off and as many as two gunmen stepped out and opened fire. Gant died two days later.
Police are working on a theory Gant or the car he was in may have been mistaken for someone else.
Toloria Gant says she raised her children right, working hard to keep them away from gangs and crime.
“He’d never been locked up, he never had a jaywalking ticket,” she said tearfully. “He just was one of them kids that I just tried to raise a sweet, young man in the city. That’s it. That’s all I tried to do as a single mother, raise my children.”
Her apartment’s walls are covered with pictures of Gant. Awards for him and his siblings are everywhere.
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“From the time I gave birth to Brandon, he was one of the cutest, sweetest, little baby boys,” his mother said. “He always kept a smile on his face; he was always happy.”
She thinks he went to a gas station on Minnesota Avenue to fill up her tank and buy her allergy medication when he was shot.
“My brother wasn’t in the street,” Dajuan Gant said. “No kid, no man, no woman, no child deserves to lose their life … at any means necessary, so for him to be taken away from us is devastating and unacceptable.”
After the funeral, detectives put up flyers in the neighborhood where Brandon Gant was killed, and someone tore them all down, police said.
“My heart is broken,” Toloria Gant said. “They took everything from me when they did this, everything from me.”
She and her family plan to have a march and rally Oct. 14.
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