Snitches end up in ditches.
The mother of a teenage murder suspect has been accused of orchestrating two follow-up murders to eliminate witnesses against her son.
Latashia Mopkins, 38, is among five people, including her son, who are charged with multiple counts of murder, conspiracy and other offenses in three murders that took place between September 2013 and April 2014. The charges are listed in St. Louis Circuit Court grand jury indictments that were made public Wednesday against the defendants, all of whom are held in jail without bail.
Mopkins, of the 4100 block of Delor Street, is accused of two counts of murder, tampering with a witness to a felony and other offenses.
The complicated tale begins with the murder on Sept. 27, 2013, of Chauncey Brown, 16, who was found shot to death the morning after a confrontation outside a youth club on Martin Luther King Drive. At the time, police said Brown and a few others left the club and were followed by five people in a car who opened fire.
Mopkins’ son, Tyrell Davidson, then also 16, later was charged as an adult in the murder of Brown, with whom he had been feuding.
Within seven months of that murder, two potential witnesses in that case were gunned down. In October 2015, after other witnesses declined to testify, prosecutors had to drop charges against Davidson and release him from jail.
The indictments allege that Mopkins enlisted her brother, Cortez McClinton, 36, and a nephew, Frederick Mopkins, 25, to silence the witnesses, and that those two men recruited Travon Knighten, 26, to their scheme. The grand jury also reinstated the murder charge against Davidson, now 19, in the killing of Brown.
The indictments were issued last week and suppressed until Wednesday after police rounded up Latashia Mopkins, Davidson and Knighten. The two others were already in jail on other charges.
The indictments say Knighten, McClinton and Frederick Mopkins have felony records for offenses ranging from drugs to theft. McClinton was found guilty of second-degree murder, kidnapping and other charges earlier this year after his accomplice in a June 2014 robbery was fatally shot by the robbery victim’s father. He was sentenced to 36 years in prison.