BATON ROUGE — A mid-afternoon barrage of gunfire at a North Ardenwood apartment complex on Aug. 29 injured five people.
Latrell Trumble, 22, died shortly after the shooting. The others, including a 14-year-old victim, are expected to survive.
His mother and his seven siblings are now waiting, devastated, for progress in the investigation.
No arrests have been made. Police said the shooting appeared to have arisen out of a multi-day dispute. Officers were called to the apartment complex more than once as the dispute escalated to verbal and physical confrontations, police said.
Lacey Trumble said the hardest thing for her to accept is that friends and family deserted her son when he needed them the most.
“His own family did not try to pick him up or bring him to the hospital,” she said.
He was at the apartment complex getting ready for a wedding, she said. He was eating outside when the gunfire began.
“When my baby got shot, y’all had a chance to pick my baby up and bring him to the hospital,” she said, speaking figuratively and angrily to the people who were there. “But . . . y’all left him to die. He would still be alive if y’all just picked my baby up.”
She’s afraid he was lured there as a setup to kill him.
“They did a sneak attack,” she said. “They shot my baby behind his back.”
An online fundraiser has been established to help cover the cost for Trumble’s funeral.
Trumble said she will always remember her son’s early basketball talent.
“He was so good in basketball when he was little. He used to throw threes when he was like six-years-old. He’s was throwing three all the time,” she recalled, saying he enjoyed excelling at it.
He grew up to be loyal, respectful and close to his seven siblings.
“He was so blessed,” she said. “He was gifted.”
Lacey Trumble said she’s spending a lot of time on her knees since her son’s death. That’s when she can breathe.
“I just need to pray real hard because everything is going through my brain cells – like I got other babies that I see, I need to live for,” she said.
Anyone with information about the shooting can contact police at the Violent Crimes Unit at (225) 389-4869
or Crime Stoppers at (225) 344-7867. Crime Stoppers accepts anonymous tips.
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