BOWDON, Ga. — It started as a house party in Bowden and has now ended in a tragedy where a mother has been forced to bury her own son.
Now, as police work to make more arrests, the victim's mother is calling for the suspect to come forward.
Chris Parker was 19 years old, a basketball star with a promising life ahead of him. It's that life, now lost, that his mother Christie Minnefield revisits in pictures and memories.
"He was a great child, not just because he was my child," she said. "Everybody knows he was a great child."
Minnefield was still too emotional to speak on camera but did share her journey in a phone call. Chris was the youngest of six kids and his mother's only son.
"I tried so hard to have him for all those years," his mother said. "I finally got blessed with him and just to have him taken from me after 19 years is hard. It's very hard."
Chris graduated from Bowdon High School in 2019 and attended college in Griffin with plans to take his basketball career to the next level.
"He was looking forward to transferring and pursuing basketball in Florida at the beginning of the year," Minnefield said. "He loved basketball since he was very young, that's what he always wanted to do."
But Chris would never be able to pursue those dreams. Sheriff's deputies said he was shot and skilled in the early morning hours of Nov. 22 at a house party in Bowdon - just two days before Thanksgiving.
Deputies arrested one man, 20-year-old Odarian Bailey after witnesses described the suspect's car. Deputies said two 18-year-old suspects, Cameron Allen and Jadarakis Caldwell, ran and have not been caught.
Chris's mother knows their arrests won't bring her son back but is still pleading with the teens to turn themselves in.
"Knowing that they're armed and dangerous, someone else could lose their lives," she said. "Just let it all be over with. Turn them in so we all can have some peace."
The Carroll County Sheriff's Office said the gun found inside the suspect's car was used in the shooting.