Sam Jane
Apr 18, 2024
16-year-old Breon Austin had big plans for clothing brand
Even though he still had two years left in high school, Breon Austin had already begun to make his mark as a fashion designer among his peers in Washington, D.C.
“He always had his own sense of style,” recalled Keymiah Armstrong, 21, a childhood friend and information technology major at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University.
“He never really liked to copy off anyone else,” Armstrong, an aspiring model, told Sneaker Theory. “He expressed himself through clothing.”
Breon had his own brand – BAGSHXT, a phrase meant to express an eagerness to make money – and planned to expand his budding enterprise, according to an article Armstrong wrote for the student newspaper at Jackson-Reed High School, then known as Wilson, where they were both students. But Breon never got the chance.
An assailant fatally shot Breon on April 19, 2019 at his home in D.C.’s Park View neighborhood.
Five years later – despite the standard $25,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction in D.C. homicide cases, and despite video surveillance that captured a car driving away from the scene – no suspects have been arrested or charged, frustrating a veteran detective who has been working the case, which will be technically classified as a “cold case” later this year.
Breon’s mother, Moranda Austin, often wonders how far her son could have gone with his entrepreneurial dreams had his life not been cut short.
“I try to imagine where my son would be right now. At 21, where would he be?” Moranda Austin told Sneaker Theory in a tearful interview at a D.C. cafe, a couple of weeks before the five-year anniversary of her son’s death.
“Would he have his own corporate business?” the grieving mother asked. “Someone took that from him early in life.”
Chanel Howard, a lead detective in the case, says Breon’s murder has been one of the most frustrating cases in her 15 years as a detective. Both she and Moranda Austin say they have an idea of who killed Breon, but no proof.
The car captured by a neighbor's alley camera is still a mystery.
“It was almost like it just disappeared,” Howard told Sneaker Theory. “I remember it being frustrating that how is it that we have all this information on this car… and for us to not be able to find it.”
Breon’s case is one of hundreds of homicides in the district that remain unsolved. The clearance rate for homicides in the district has hovered around 70% for the past decade or so, police data show.
The year 2019 was a particularly violent year for Breon’s block: the 700 block of Princeton Place. Two months after Breon was killed, a 29-year-old man was killed in the same block, allegedly over a $20 debt.
A recent visit to the block belies its violent past. Adult men played soccer and kids ran or rode bikes around a track at a park across the street. A faded District of Columbia flag hung on a flagpole at one house. A yard sign outside another home called for a ceasefire in Gaza.
Moranda Austin has since moved out of the neighborhood. She bought the house that Breon and her looked at together online. With three other sons, Moranda Austin has tried to move past the pain.
It's so hard, she said. There are days when she wants to take the case into her own hands, she said. But then she remembers her son.
The son that loved clothes. The son that watched Bob Ross paint on the television with his grandmother growing up. The son who once donated his fast food meal to a homeless man.
Breon loved shoes, too. He would steal his mom’s shoes, before he outgrew her. Stacks of shoe boxes piled on top of each other in his closet.
“Oh my goodness, that boy had so many shoes,” Moranda Austin said. “When he got older, that’s when he started designing them.”
On one occasion, she said, Breon sent his designs to Nike. Efforts to confirm the account with Nike were not successful, but it would have been consistent with Breon’s lifelong love of art and design.
“He started getting things together back in elementary school,” Moranda Austin said. “That’s all he was about was art, art, art.”
“I felt like he was just getting started. Like he hadn't even really made a dent into his dreams and his goals and his aspirations,” Breon’s friend, Keymiah Armstrong, recalled. “Like he really was just getting started.”
Some of her most vivid memories of Breon are of how he always had on a fresh pair of sneakers that no one else had.
“Every time I saw Breon he actually always had a new pair of shoes,” Armstrong recalled. “Like oh my god, how did you get those?”
Armstrong said Breon had shoe connections that enabled him to get the next pair of Air Jordans or other sneakers ahead of everyone else.
“Whatever was new, whatever just came out, it was always on his feet,” Armstrong recalled. “I thought that was always so cool.”