John Jefferson
Left: Lumumba Sayers Sr. (Adams County Sheriff’s Office). Right: Lumumba Sayers Jr. (Obituary).
An anti-gun activist in Colorado is now behind bars after allegedly killing a man to avenge the shooting death of his son.
Lumumba Sayers Jr., 23, worked with his father in various prominent ways. They were both mixed martial arts (MMA) fighters who provided community outreach to end the scourge of youth violence.
On Aug. 19, 2023, the young fighter known in the ring as “Heavy Hands” was shot and killed in Denver’s Five Points neighborhood along with a friend. Two other victims were wounded in that incident.
On Aug. 10 of this year, Lumumba Sayers Sr., 46, allegedly shot and killed a friend of the man police once believed was the prime suspect in — and even once arrested for — the Five Points massacre. He now stands accused of murder in the first degree and felony menacing.
Malcolm Watson, 28, was hosting his child’s birthday pool party on Saturday afternoon at Pioneer Park in Commerce City, a northeastern suburb of Denver. By the end of the day, Watson had been brutally killed and the other guests were made privy to absolute horror.
As the victim was leaving the party at around 5 p.m., a man walked up to him, pulled out a gun, and shot him “in the head at close range,” witnesses told law enforcement, according to an arrest affidavit for Sayers, Sr. obtained by Denver-based NBC affiliate KUSA.
Investigators later found four spent shell casings near Watson’s body, according to CBS News. He suffered three gunshot wounds.
After Watson was dead, Sayers Sr. returned to his vehicle and retrieved a second gun, police allege. Then, witnesses said, the alleged killer tried to shoot again but was unable to do so, because the second gun had jammed. Next, he planted the second gun underneath Watson’s body, video allegedly shows.
Adding some confusion to the shocking slaying is that one witness mentioned a second shooter, police said, and later confirmed by way of surveillance footage from the park itself.
After Watson fell, the second shooter allegedly shouted: “I got you, m––––– f–––––.”
Revenge was mentioned by some of those in attendance, police say.
“Witnesses had stated the [shooter’s son] had been murdered about a year ago by a friend of the deceased,” the affidavit reportedly reads about a “possible” motive. “[T]his murder was probably in retaliation or revenge.”
Another witness cited by police in the affidavit put the terrifying shooting in blunt terms, saying the defendant “killed her baby’s daddy on the baby’s birthday.”
The victim’s sister told the TV station that Watson’s 5-year-old son was the birthday boy whose party ended in tragedy.
She dismissed the shooter’s would-be motive as inane.
“How is it a revenge killing if my brother isn’t the one who had anything to do with it?” Watson’s sister asked out loud.
The previous suspect in the killing of Sayers Jr. is Tyrell Braxton, 25. He was arrested in September 2023 and charged with murder. That case, however, was subsequently dismissed — and all the records were sealed in accord with Mile High State law, according to Denver-based ABC affiliate KMGH.
Now, successive generations of fathers and sons are dead, facing life in prison, and without one another — a man who lost his son accused of robbing another son of his own father — caught in the same small and isolated, but nonetheless powerful, spiraling storm of gun violence.
The Sayers family have long been prominent in their community — ironically working to end gun violence and to bring once-warring gang members together in the name of unity.
“He’s the founder of the Gloves Up Guns Down: Get Your Heads Up in the Hood movement. He was stopping a lot of the violence here in the community. Putting on boxing matches and stuff and showing these kids that there’s a different way. He ran my moving company for me, that was my best friend,” Lumumba Sayers Sr. said of his son last year in comments to KMGH. “He was better than me. He was going to make it farther than I was. I had the recipe. He had the skills.”
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