Darryl Green's cousin and father said the Harper High School junior stayed away from gangs. But Green’s father also said the last time he talked to his son, he wound up staring down the barrel of a gun.
"He pulled out a firearm at myself," said the senior Green. “I haven’t seen him since.”
The father and son were having a “discussion” about something the teen didn’t want to do for his dad. But he said the argument quickly escalated when the 17-year-old pointed a gun at his father, then hopped over a fence carrying a bag of his clothes.
Darryl Green was found in a vacant West Englewood home.
The elder Green said he thought his son had gone to stay with his mother Patricia Moore. But four days later on July 11, his son’s decaying body and the same backpack of clothes he carried with him after their argument were found in a boarded-up house on the 5600 block of S. Damen Ave. The younger Green had a gunshot wound in his head and was pronounced dead on the scene.
Police have not yet arrested any suspects in the murder, leaving his father to wonder what happened between the argument Monday night and the phone call he received notifying him that his son’s body had been found Thursday afternoon.
“The answers ain’t coming in,” the older Green said. “He didn’t hang with a lot of people.”
“As far as I know, he didn’t have no problems with anyone,” Green said.
His grandmother, Bertha Green, said he liked playing video games and watching television.
The younger Green enjoyed playing basketball and football, and his cousin Eric Coleman said he was on the Harper team at one time.
Coleman, also a 17-year-old Harper High School student, was asked if Green may have been involved with a gang. He said he wasn’t, and that he and his cousin were close enough that “he’d tell me if he was.”
“He was a good kid,” Coleman said.
But the elder Darryl Green did not know why his son had a gun. The troubled teen had been arrested for possession of a firearm a year prior to his death. His father said he disliked school, but he continued to go per the terms of his probation that resulted from that 2012 arrest. Family members initially told some news sources the reserved teen had been scared to go to school because he was being targeted to join a gang, but his father and his cousin, Eric Coleman, said they didn’t know anything about that.
John Carpenter contributed to this report.