‘We’re looking for a shooter’: College athlete from DeKalb killed

Stevenson Derival, shown in a 2014 photo from his Facebook page, was killed at a house party in Mount Vernon, Georgia, over the weekend, police said.

Stevenson Derival, shown in a 2014 photo from his Facebook page, was killed at a house party in Mount Vernon, Georgia, over the weekend, police said.

Over the weekend, 20-year-old Decatur native Stevenson Derival, a student and athlete at South Georgia’s Brewton-Parker College, was shot dead at a house party.

Mount Vernon Police Chief Calvin Burns said it appears more than 200 people were at the gathering early Sunday, and they all fled when the gun rang.

“We’re looking for a shooter,” the chief said Monday morning. “We’re asking the public for help.”

Derival, who attended Towers High in DeKalb County, wrestled and was on the track and field team at Brewton-Parker, a private Christian school in Mount Vernon. It’s about 165 miles southeast of Atlanta, near Vidalia.

“Please pray for the family of Stevenson Derival who passed away early this morning in a tragic off-campus incident,” college President Steve Echols wrote Sunday on Facebook. “We are all shocked and broken-hearted to see a friend and student whose life held such promise to be cut short in such a devastating way.”

Few details so far have been released on the shooting. With so many people at the party and such a mass disbursement, finding the shooter could be difficult, the police chief said.

But he said his agency is investigating, along with the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

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