Gulfport teen found shot dead in car, deputy coroner says

GULFPORT, Miss. (WLOX) - A Gulfport teen was found shot dead in a car Wednesday afternoon.

Harrison County Deputy Coroner Ben Bentz confirms the victim is 19-year-old Ozell Addison, Jr. Bentz says Addison was found with a gunshot wound in a vehicle in the 2000 block of 31st Street, near the intersection of 20th Avenue.

The vehicle belongs to a homeowner according to the mechanic who made the grisly discovery.

“Two kids walking down the alley there, the neighbor said somebody is in that car,” mechanic, David Bielefeldt said. “I went back and looked again in the very back of it and there was a body back there so I looked to see if I could get any response and I could see there was no movement, no breathing or nothing.”

A day later, a memorial now sits in his honor.

His family left behind, a broken shell of what it used to be, remembering him after he never returned home from seeing a friend on Saturday.

“As a kid, he was very fun, always kept a smile on everybody’s face,” his mother, Patricia May. “He was going to make jokes. He was a drummer, he would bang on my lamps to learn how to play.”

“I’m his big sister,” Chyna Crowther said. “So I watched him from a toddler to a grown man. I just wanna say that I’m a grieving sister and you took a big part of my heart out.”

Addison went to Lincoln Tech in Nashville specializing in welding and machinery, ready to take his tools of the trade to the military. He was gearing up to take a final entrance exam into the army on Monday.

His family believes he was targeted.

“It’s more like I’m jealous of you,” his father, King May, Jr. said. “I don’t like what you’re doing. You think you’re better than me so I’m going to take you out. That’s the way it seems to me. Nevermind what you may do to a whole family by destroying one.”

Now the family is pleading for answers, closure, and an end to the violence.

“You wouldn’t want this feeling that I’m feeling, you wouldn’t want to be in my shoes,” Crowther said.

“Let’s drop the guns and pick up the Bible,” his father said. “We don’t need the gun violence. Don’t grab a gun and be a coward. There’s no bigger coward than one that grabs a gun and doesn’t come foward.”

“We are really hurt for our child and miss our child, just come forward and give us some relief,” his mother said.

An autopsy on Friday determined a single gunshot wound was in fact the cause of death. Officials are now investigating the case as a homicide.

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