Solgee was on some sort of mission, it seemed. He filled the boys' ears with extravagant talk about the riches in a trap less than a block away on Cleveland Street, where some other Jamaicans had just set up shop. Piles of money, drugs, weapons--and all of it right next door: Solgee's rap incited the two hotheads, Money Mike and Trouble, and eventually persuaded Uzi and the others. Tree Tree especially remembers Money Mike getting all "hyped up," flailing his arms like the caricature of a Brooklyn tough and saying repeatedly, in his phony accent and with a blunt in one hand, "We can do this. We can take that trap." Money Mike later identified Solgee as a Jamaican named Gregory Allen in court testimony and said he was carrying an Uzi, and Larmond would tell police that Soldier went into the crack house carrying "a machine gun with a strap over his shoulder."
Late that night--Tree Tree doesn't remember what time, only that it was dark--the boys, by now a posse of as many as a dozen, left for Cleveland Street. She was the only one who stayed behind. As she revisited that night, she started recalling their names, their clothing, their weapons. Larmond and Latouche were in the group; Babyface was carrying a rifle or shotgun. Trouble was dressed in a black suit; Money Mike was armed with a .45. She identifies other names mentioned later in the statements to police: Trigger and Shawn were cousins from Trinidad, she says. And one name in Larmond's statement that baffled police--"Donavan Quaile"--was none other than her Adrian, who'd made up the name as a joke after watching the movie Young Guns.
Julie Lyons
Mark Larmond in 1989 (right), when he was arrested for carrying an Uzi, and today in prison. He is 32.
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She remembers being uneasy about the posse's mission, simply because of a standing rule of the game: You don't mess your own house. Cleveland Street was way too close to home.
Tree Tree never heard any shots or screams. She didn't, in fact, have any idea what was going down in the trap next door. But when Larmond and Latouche returned in the early-morning hours, she knew something had gone wrong. Uzi and Babyface were nervous, unusually quiet. All they'd ever tell her is that things didn't happen the way they were supposed to. Tree Tree would hear from other sources that, No. 1, the trap wasn't full of gold as Solgee had imagined, and No. 2, that it was in fact run by "children." And one was dead. And three others were shot to pieces.
Within a couple of weeks, Larmond was arrested at a motel, along with Money Mike, and Latouche booked a plane home to England, where he stayed for several months with his family while things cooled down in Dallas.
Tree Tree only found out when we talked that one of the victims, Ken Covington, had spoken the name "Babyface" just before he was shot in the head.
For a moment, Tree Tree was overtaken by a terrible thought.
"Did Babyface shoot them?" she asked quietly.
She quickly banished the idea. He wouldn't do that, she said; he could never shoot a child. But wherever Uzi was, she said, Babyface was right there beside him. One fact is on Babyface's side: She remembers clearly that he was the only gunman carrying a long weapon --a rifle or shotgun--and none of the ballistics evidence matched it. Daryl Oudems' account, however, appears to place Babyface inside the apartment. He says a man with a pump-action shotgun held the weapon to his head while he knelt in the bathtub alone.
Larmond and Latouche would later insist to her that they weren't in the apartment when the shooting started, but she wonders why Covington spoke the name "Babyface." She'll never know for sure.
What's certain is that all of their lives went into free fall after that night. Tree Tree missed her Babyface so bad, she convinced him to come back to Dallas. They were soon married: She was 17; he was 19. They had a daughter together, a lovely, quiet girl with a soft face, just like her father.
After their daughter's birth, the two drifted apart. Tree Tree blames herself. Latouche stayed in his daughter's life, but at some point, he slipped back into the game.
They found his body at 10 a.m. on November 20, 1996, in the building at 2810 Gould where Tree Tree once lived, and where the attack on Cleveland Street had begun. He'd been shot four times in the upper body; he had a knife at his side. The apartment's door was locked, suggesting that he let in the man who killed him.
Dallas police charged a young man named Virgil Standifer in connection with the murder, but the charge was later dropped.
A few days later, Latouche was buried without ceremony in a pauper's grave. Tree Tree doesn't even have a picture of him today; all that's left of him is a watch, two bloodstained rings in a plastic bag and their 12-year-old daughter, who has a single memory of her father. He took her to Bachman Lake one day to feed the ducks, and memorialized their time together with a snapshot.
Tree Tree nearly begins to cry at the memory. Today, she is remarried and preparing to move to another city, but when we spoke her husband wasn't even aware of her past. She told him that night.
