Good Guy with a Gun #262: St. Louis, MO
The gun didn't victimize the teen. The teen victimized a man, and the gun stopped it. | Original incident: July 20, 2024
These posts are based on our Good Guy with a Gun calendar. Today’s post is significantly updated from the calendar version.
Markaveon Jackson didn’t pull the trigger the night Givonni Diaz died. Missouri charged him with murder anyway.
It happened just before 1:30 on a Saturday morning, when two 24-year-old men were sitting in a parked car. Four men in dark clothing and ski masks walked up out of nowhere.
One of them reached through an open window and started grabbing whatever he could find, while two more stood behind the car with a rifle between them. When one of the four went for the passenger door, the passenger beat him to it: he pulled his own gun and shot the man leaning through the window, hitting him in the chest.
That man was Givonni Diaz. Police had him at 16 that morning; his age got corrected to 15 only after he died.
The other three loaded him into a white SUV, dropped him at a hospital, and were gone before officers arrived. They left a ski mask behind as the only physical evidence. An off-duty officer working security nearby heard the shots and watched them do it. The two victims didn’t stick around either: they drove off, called 911 to report the hold-up, and met police six blocks south on Broadway, saying they didn’t feel safe where they’d been sitting.
Diaz held on for 17 days before he died on August 6. St. Louis police closed the loop on the shooting fast, calling it a justifiable homicide.
Seven months later, prosecutors charged Markaveon Jackson, 19 — one of the three who’d carried Diaz to the hospital — with second-degree murder under Missouri’s felony murder rule, on top of first-degree robbery and two counts of armed criminal action. Cellphone data put him at the scene.
There’s a lot of talk about teens being killed by “gun violence,” as if guns just decide on their own that they should kill teens. This case serves as a reminder that teens — and sometimes younger — are often the cause of gun violence as well as its victims. And the gun violence in this case is what prevented the crime victims from being victimized worse.
Precious Jones, whose own son was shot dead in Hazelwood two summers before, talked to KSDK and called it part of a “teen crime crisis.” Diaz was, by her count, the 45th teen shot in the city that year. That’s not a small problem, nor a new one, but the issue isn’t “gun violence” per se.
Sources
Primary
The SLMPD’s own release is the fullest account of the four — the only place the off-duty officer’s eyewitness detail shows up. UPDATE: 15-Year-Old Robber Dies After Being Shot by Victim (SLMPD)
Local news
First Alert 4/KMOV ran two pieces: the original report, then the felony-murder follow-up seven months later.
15-year-old dies after being shot by victim during armed robbery in Soulard (Original incident/death). Note that they got the term “victim” right — the person who was shot wasn’t the victim; the people being robbed were.
Man charged with shooting death of accomplice in July armed robbery in St. Louis (Felony-murder charge)
KSDK’s Anne Stegen covered the same ground and is the one who followed up with the community-reaction angle. 15-year-old shot while committing robbery in Soulard last month dies, police say (KSDK)
Fox2’s Joey Schneider covered the felony-murder charge too, but the piece conflates the robbery scene with the unrelated address six blocks south where the victims regrouped with police afterward. Man charged in accomplice’s death during St. Louis armed robbery (Fox2now)
STLtoday’s homicide tracker carries the same basic facts in a short structured entry. Givonni Diaz (STLtoday Homicide Tracker)