By Andrew Califf and Thomas Tracy in the New York Daily News on Feb 10, 2023 at 12:27 p.m.
The heartbroken mom of a missing 19-year-old man found burned and shot in the head near a desolate section of train track in Brooklyn has a message to the person who ended her son’s life.
“Whoever you are, you killed an innocent, sweet kid,” Daniella Matthews scrawled on a Daily News reporter’s notepad outside her East Flatbush home Friday. “Please know justice will be served for my son!! You don’t even know the pain you have caused.”
Matthews and her family were still reeling from the death of her son, DeAndre, who disappeared from his East Flatbush home around 5:45 p.m. Monday and was found murdered three miles from their home the next day.
The teen’s body was discovered face down on the freight train tracks beneath the Target parking lot on Flatbush Ave. near Ave. H in Flatbush, steps from Brooklyn College’s campus, around 4 p.m., Tuesday cops said.
He had “significant burn wounds throughout his body,” police said, indicating he may have been set on fire at some point.
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“I just want them to catch the monster,” Matthews said bitterly, too grief-stricken to speak further.
DeAndre left work at the Buggy Service Center, a car wash near his home in Crown Heights the day he disappeared and did not return, Jeremy Moskowitz, the company owner, said.
“He joined the company in January and was well-liked by his colleagues,” Moskowitz said. “Everyone that worked with DeAndre is shocked and saddened by this horrible news. We send our condolences to his family and grieve alongside the larger community.”
His mother’s Jeep Cherokee, which DeAndre had used the day he disappeared, was found on Troy Ave. in Crown Heights, a few miles from where the teen was found.
It had also been burned, Matthews’ family told CBS 2.
An autopsy later determined Matthews had been shot in the head and suffered from smoke inhalation, according to police.
Detectives on Friday were tracking Matthews movements from the moment he left his home Monday to when he was found dead in the hopes it will lead them to his killer.
“This is disgusting,” Matthews’ sister, Dajanae Gillespie, told CBS 2. “Like, my brother didn’t do anything to nobody, and I can really say that. He wasn’t in a gang. He wasn’t a violent kid. He wasn’t a bad kid. You know what I’m saying? He stayed in the house.”
He had no criminal record, police said.
Andrew Califf 