Death Let itself in
Chris Russell / Columbus Dispatch
The basement of Melissa Fluellen’s South Linden home seemed like a haven for the four teenage boys.
The friends spent nearly every afternoon at 16-year-old Calvin Fluellen’s house, rapping, dancing and joking around. Calvin’s mom — “Miss Melissa,” they called her — would fill their bellies with her good Southern cooking and give them a safe place to chill out.
She wouldn’t let them walk home after dark. Outside could be dangerous. This same group of friends had seen a 15-year-old boy gunned down outside Linden-McKinley STEM Academy, less than a mile away, last year.
So if one of the friends hadn’t been picked up by a parent by nightfall, he slept at Miss Melissa’s. The boys often went to school in the same clothes they had worn to her house the day before. Having the boys in her basement, where she could hear their beats and raps from upstairs, appeared to be the best choice for the single mother of five, Fluellen said.
Calvin is her baby, her only son. The other boys were like her sons, too — 14-year-old Terrico Henry; his cousin Ricky Walton; and Angelo Womick, 16.
Ricky’s 17th birthday was Jan. 13, and the boys, as usual, were camped out in the basement. Fluellen was upstairs.
At 4:30 that Monday afternoon, her serenity was shattered with a crack. Terrico was bleeding from his chest. Calvin was holding the gun.
By the next morning, Terrico was dead and Calvin was locked up, accused of killing his friend. The worlds of two families had been upended.
“I took two losses,” Fluellen said. “I got a baby dead and a baby locked up. I didn’t birth [Terrico], but I was a mama to him. And that was a brother to my child.”
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Terrica Henry, also a mother of five, isn’t angry, but she has questions.
Terrico was her oldest. He loved football and his mom. He didn’t mind running errands with her, as he did the day before he died, or even shadowing her at her job at National Grid.
At first, when Terrico started spending so much time at Calvin’s, Henry was wary. Did Calvin’s mom really want a bunch of kids at her house all the time?
But Terrico assured her, “Miss Melissa loves me like I’m her own.”
Her son was comfortable there, Henry said. She has trouble getting past the fact that he was killed at a place where he felt safe.
“I never pictured something like this,” she said. “I felt like, hey, Miss Melissa, you assured me my son was in good hands.”
After he was shot, before he went into surgery, Terrico told his dad about a scuffle with Calvin in the basement.
“He pushed me and I pushed him back, and there was a gunshot,” Terrico said in a strong voice at Nationwide Children’s Hospital. At that point, his family thought he’d recover. He died just after 11 p.m. on the day he was shot.
Calvin told her the shooting was an accident, Fluellen said. That’s what she told Henry when the two women spoke briefly.
“She can’t tell me nothing that I want to hear,” Henry said.
She doesn’t feel betrayed or angry, she said. “I just want to know what happened. I just want to know the truth.”
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On the day he turned 17, Ricky Walton held his cousin as he bled.
Ricky said in a recent interview that he was walking out of the basement when he heard the crack of the gun. He turned around, saw Terrico bleeding, saw a gun on the ground and looked back toward Calvin’s face.
“He looked shocked,” Ricky said. “That’s the reason I thought it was an accident.”
Now, he’s not as sure. “I can’t really say it was an accident or on purpose,” he said.
Ricky was in the basement when Columbus police arrived. He was charged with a delinquency count of carrying a concealed weapon. He said he picked up a .25-caliber gun that had fallen from Terrico’s pocket and police caught him with it.
He’s back on electronic monitoring. It’s his second concealed-carry charge. Police also found him with a loaded Glock 9mm on Oct. 16. The court is now considering placing him in detention.
Ricky didn’t want to talk about any of that. He was upset that the court told him he couldn’t go to his cousin’s funeral. Terrico is the second person he has seen shot. A year ago, he saw Kaewaun Coleman, 15, gunned down near Linden-McKinley.
Coleman was one of four teenagers who died by a gun in Columbus last year.
Terrico’s death is “still in my head,” Ricky said. “It’s real hard to get it out.”
The fourth teen in the basement that day was on his way out of the house when police arrived. Angelo Womick is accused of scooping up a gun to hide it from police. He was charged with a delinquency count of tampering with evidence, placed on electronic monitoring and released to his mom.
His next court date is Feb. 19. A message left with his mother went unreturned.
Police won’t say how many guns were in the basement that day or who brought them in. That’s one of Henry’s questions — where did the gun come from?
“Where we’re from, it’s easy to get your hands on one,” she said.
“They kids — everybody makes mistakes. But my son’s not here no more.”
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Melissa Fluellen is trying to hold it together for her son, who has a hearing on Feb. 25 to determine whether he will be tried on a murder charge as an adult.
“I feel like I want to lose my mind, but I know I got to stay strong because my baby needs me,” she said. “He’s never been away from me in 16 years.”
A week after the shooting, before police would let her return to her home of nearly 10 years, she drove by the house at 1064 E. 15th Ave. and saw that the back door was wide open. The house had been ransacked.
Community Properties of Ohio, which owns the house, said the shooting was a violation of her lease and gave her five days to move.
On Jan. 31, the day she was supposed to be out, scrappers stole her dryer out of her backyard as she packed her belongings and spoke to a Dispatch reporter. She just sighed.
“I can’t cry about that anymore because that’s spilled milk,” she said. “I just got to wipe it up.”
She said some people have questioned why she allowed the boys in her home, how she could have let the shooting happen. But feeding and sheltering the boys always felt like the right thing to do, she said. With little money to spend, that’s how she shows love.
“They say what you put out, it’ll come back,” she said. “I know it don’t seem like it’s coming back to me now.”