Parrish Pierce knew what he was getting involved in.
As a teenager, he became entrenched in a local street gang, committing violent crime and seeing those close to him killed one by one. His crew, a subset of the national Bloods gang, had a particular calling card.
“Sex Money Murder, it spoke for itself,” his mother, Decembre Pierce, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution during several exclusive interviews.
In 2020, the day after Thanksgiving, Parrish was at his mother’s house in metro Atlanta feeling emboldened for the first time in years. He had recently been beaten up and was frightened of death, scared his young daughter would grow up without a father, and remorseful for what his life had become, he told Decembre.
Parrish had talked about changing his life in the past, but so many previous heartbreaks left his mother skeptical. Looking into his eyes, on this night, something behind them was different. Something only a mother could sense from their child.
The 20-year-old wanted out.
Credit: Natrice Miller
“He said, ‘I just want to be the son you always wanted. I want to make you proud’ and I told him, ‘You are the son I always wanted,’” Decembre said. “He just made a lot of bad choices.”
Unfortunately, the revelation came too late.
Just days after that tear-filled conversation, Parrish was fatally shot near the City of Griffin Golf Course. His body was recovered a week later, found by a golfer playing the 17th hole on Dec. 9, 2020. His killer? A fellow member of Sex Money Murder, one of more than 1,500 suspected gang networks the Georgia Attorney General’s Office has identified across the state.
With member recruitment and organized criminal activity on the rise, containing the growing threat of dangerous gangs remains a top priority for state officials, including Gov. Brian Kemp. A recently created state gang prosecution unit and a new state law that results in tougher gang recruitment penalties are targeted at the 71,000 active gang members in Georgia.
Cedravious Wilkerson, a young man Decembre described as her son’s best friend and “little brother,” was Parrish’s first introduction to life in a gang. He was sentenced to life in prison two months ago for Parrish’s murder.
The day he was killed, Parrish planned to help Wilkerson and his buddy’s mother move. Video played during Wilkerson’s recent court case showed them walking down the street together before the 17-year-old suddenly pulled out a gun and shot Parrish several times.
He likely never saw it coming.
A downward spiral
Decembre said she had seen her son’s tattoos, Facebook posts and shouts of gang life for months before that November conversation. It got to the point where she couldn’t recognize her once fun-loving and outgoing child, who started skipping school, hanging out with other gang members and getting into trouble with the law.
One day he came home with an overlapped Double R tattoo on his face representing the Sex Money Murder gang, which is well known to state gang experts for committing violent acts including murder, extortion and human trafficking.
At that point, his mother understood things were serious.
“I knew he was just a whole different person,” she said.
Credit: Decembre Pierce
Credit: Decembre Pierce
Parrish, who was 19 at the time, was arrested in October 2019 after he and two other men pointed guns and carjacked a man sitting in his vehicle outside a Walmart in Lovejoy. Authorities found a .45 caliber handgun in Parrish’s backpack, leading to charges of armed robbery and firearm possession.
If there were other crimes Parrish committed, Decembre said she was in the dark about them. But her mother’s intuition told her that her son was no murderer.
“He didn’t just wake up one day and say he wanted to be a gang member,” she said. “My son went through a lot.”
A childhood stolen by abuse
Growing up in North Carolina, Parrish was like any other kid with a love for basketball and football, his mother said. He was a smart aleck at times, full of silly antics, but also caring.
One weekday, when Decembre was sick, Parrish walked into her bedroom. The 12-year-old was grinning ear to ear while holding white flowers, a card and a balloon, bought with money he had earned from doing chores.
“I just wanted to say you always need to be appreciated sometime, someday, somewhere,” he told the single mother.
That’s the child she frequently pictures in her mind now.
There were times when Parrish got in trouble at school, but Decembre said it was your typical boyish behavior and no cause for concern. Encouraged by his mother’s emphasis on faith, he became a member of a church pantomime group led by minister Andre Thorpe. It’s a name she can’t forget.
“It all began with Andre,” she said.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Thorpe used his position of power, along with drugs and manipulation, to groom and sexually abuse Parrish starting in 2013. Decembre said she was unaware of Thorpe’s intentions at first, only recalling him becoming agitated and clingy toward Parrish when their family was about to move to Georgia.
For months after they moved, the church leader secretly communicated with the 14-year-old via social media, giving him a plan of how to slip away and return to North Carolina. Parrish did eventually leave home — and it wouldn’t be the last time a wedge was driven between mother and son.
Credit: Decembre Pierce
Credit: Decembre Pierce
As a traveling minister, Thorpe was difficult to find. Decembre filed police reports, took weekly trips to North Carolina, put out flyers and had Parrish listed in the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The FBI also got involved.
Parrish had brief moments of clarity, like the time he escaped while Thorpe was at the store and hitchhiked to another part of the state to meet family members. He had been abused and beaten, and appeared malnourished. “He was really shaken and crying,” Decembre said about one reunion.
But he was lured back.
In total, Parrish was missing for about four months in mid-2015 and roughly nine weeks the following year. The abuse continued until around April 2016, when a family member happened to spot Parrish and Thorpe at a car dealership in Raleigh. Decembre immediately contacted the FBI, and Thorpe was arrested there on a sex offense charge, Raleigh police confirmed.
Credit: Decembre Pierce
Credit: Decembre Pierce
In July 2017, Thorpe was again arrested in North Carolina on state charges of first-degree sexual exploitation of a minor, federal authorities said. After a wide-ranging investigation uncovered all of his crimes, he pleaded guilty in 2019 to child pornography and was sentenced to 40 years in prison followed by a lifetime of supervised release.
“The victim in this case — and the victim’s family — have been terrorized,” prosecutors said at the time.
A bad influence
The caring little boy was now a rebellious teenager, prone to lashing out and fighting at school. In the intervening times he was home, Decembre tried reasoning with Parrish, but her words went right through him. She turned to therapy for her son. Then the nightmares took hold, she said, leading Parrish to sleep in front of her bed and in the closet to feel safe.
The mother kept trying. And still trouble found the son, eventually landing him before a juvenile judge in Georgia.
With her blessing, Decembre said the judge sent Parrish to a regional youth detention center in Rome, a secure facility that provides temporary housing for youths under the supervision of the state Department of Juvenile Justice. The nature of these programs makes information about their participants difficult to obtain, according to DJJ spokesman Glenn Allen.
Parrish’s placement there was brief, and Decembre was hopeful it would protect her son from further harm. But it was there that he met Wilkerson, who was already part of the Sex Money Murder gang.
Experts say it’s not uncommon for kids to be recruited into gangs in juvenile facilities.
“The moment a juvenile enters a facility, you will see automatic recruiting occurring. The gang activity within our juvenile facilities is high,” said Jose Ramirez, president of the Georgia Gang Investigators Association. “I know the DJJ is trying to do everything they can with programs, identification and monitoring all these individuals.”
Decembre said joining the gang made her emotionally broken son feel wanted and not ashamed of what had happened to him. He was taking back control, in all the wrong ways.
Credit: NATRICE MILLER
Credit: NATRICE MILLER
“He was afraid that he was going to be looked at differently, looked at as gay or weak or whatever,” his mother said. “And he turned to the gang because he wanted to be seen in a different light.”
Parrish’s personality was different when he moved back in with Decembre in Fayetteville, she said. Over the next three years, she became a spectator to his destructive decisions, culminating in the 2019 arrest.
Still, they remained close, and Decembre routinely told him he needed to change. He eventually opened up to her.
“He would never tell me specifically the stuff he saw, but he feared somebody was going to kill him one day,” she said. “He didn’t know if it was gonna be a fellow gang member or a rival gang member, but he knew he had to get out of it.”
Getting out is nearly impossible, according to Kit Cummings, a youth gang expert and Georgia native who is the founder of the Power of Peace Project, an organization that helps redirect young people who are on a dangerous path. He said the ability to leave a gang comes down to how much status you have built up — and Parrish likely didn’t have enough.
“If he hasn’t gotten the credibility, he’s gonna get killed because the gang does not want a reputation of people getting in and out,” Cummings said. “So that whole world is about respect, power, and the rules of the game. It’s like they have to protect their brand, if you will. They can’t let that word get out.”
According to Ramirez, the gang investigator, once you get into Sex Money Murder, “The only way you’re out is by your blood.”
He said Georgia takes a three-pronged approach to save kids like Parrish, starting with prevention and intervention and using prosecution as a last resort. The state would rather identify children at the highest risk and connect them with community partners or mentors before they end up in the criminal justice system — or, as in Parrish’s case, killed by gang violence.
A mother’s son
It’s still unclear why Wilkerson shot Parrish. He never admitted why at his trial, or when he was sentenced. Decembre feels he was trying to rise in the ranks after one of the gang’s leaders was killed.
Love continues to surround her thoughts, even during the dark days of sitting alone on the edge of her bed, forced to accept the unexpected pain of loss. Heartbroken, but not defeated, she wants Parrish to be remembered for who he was: a son and a father, a young man who had a difficult life and made bad choices.
For years, she saw her child being pulled in all the wrong directions — and felt helpless to prevent it. Now she just wants to be heard. To laugh. And to remember the peaceful times, like the day they spent together about two months prior to his death.
Credit: Pierce family
Credit: Pierce family
As they took a selfie, Parrish commented on her freshly cut hairdo. Decembre then glanced at it, looked at her son and realized how much they looked like twins.
“This was the next to the last picture that we took together,” Decembre said. “God, what I wouldn’t give to take one more pic with my son.”
HOW WE GOT THE STORY
Decembre Pierce, the mother of Parrish Pierce, granted The Atlanta Journal-Constitution access to her son’s troubled life, including his time in the Sex Money Murder gang, his background of abuse and his eventual death in 2020, over the course of multiple interviews. After reporter David Aaro covered the conviction of her son’s killer, Pierce contacted him to shed light on her son and the challenges her family faced in an effort to spare another family from his fate.
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