A 16-year-old boy who is the prime suspect in the murder of 19-year-old Jared Mealey turned himself in to the St. Charles Parish Sheriff’s Office last night.
Authorities say that Keywine “Poppa” Bradford allegedly shot Mealey several times on May 29 in St. Rose. Mealey was found slumped over in his car with bullet holes in his face and neck.
Bradford is currently being held at the St. James Juvenile Facility.
Before he was tragically gunned down last week, Jared Mealey wanted to follow in the footsteps of his older half-brother Rondell Mealey, who starred as a running back at Destrehan before going onto LSU and then the NFL as a member of the Green Bay Packers.
“That was his dream. When he was in middle school he used to say to me ‘Dad, I am going to go pro and buy you a new house’,” said Leo Mealey. “His football career didn’t quite work out like he thought it would though.”
Jared, 19, was on the football team at Destrehan for four years as a back-up defensive lineman. His cousin Dillan Dent, who graduated in 2012 and received a football scholarship to Missouri Southern, was a teammate of Jared’s and said that the last time they spoke Jared was still thinking about continuing his football career.
“He was talking about how he was going to get back into school and one of our former coaches at Destrehan was helping,” Dent said. “The plan was for him to do his part at Delgado (Community College) to get his GPA up and [the coach] was going to try to get him to go to a Division II or junior college to play football somewhere. We talked about what I was doing after I graduated.”
Dent said he grew up with Jared from the age of five and lived right down the street from him.
“He was pretty much a peacemaker. If he saw two teammates getting into it he would break it up,” Dent said. “Anyone Jared came across they were like family to him. He would give them the shirt off his back if he had to. Whatever you needed you could always go to Jared.”
Destrehan High School Principal Stephen Weber said he remembers Jared a as a typical teenager who did not cause a lot of trouble.
“I just knew Jared like any other student. He was an average student, he played football. Not much more to that,” Weber said.
Weber said he had not heard anything about Jared until the St. Charles Parish Sheriff’s Office announced he had been shot to death a few blocks from his family’s home on Turtle Creek Drive in St. Rose, becoming the first person murdered in the parish in more than a year.
“Jared was a happy-go-lucky guy with a good personality so it came as a surprise to me,” Weber said. “This is a tragedy, obviously, for something like that to happen in St. Charles Parish.”
Leo said the last time he saw his son alive was as he left their house the evening of Tuesday, May 29.
“I just looked at him and he didn’t look back. He didn’t say ‘Dad, I’ll be back’ or ‘Dad, I’m going such and such a place and I’ll be back soon.’ He just walked out and I just saw the back of his head,” Leo said. “No more than 15 minutes later or half an hour later my god-child was banging on the door saying she heard Jared got shot back in the third section of Preston Hollow on the same street right here.”
Dent said he saw Jared after he left his house and only minutes before his death.
“I was on my way home and I honked and I waved at him and when I saw him he was smiling as always. He honked back,” Dent said. “Not even ten minutes later I got a phone call from one of the friends of the family.”
Dent said he got on his bike and rode down to the crime scene.
“By the time I made it out of my house and started to make my way down the street people were already gathering,” Dent said.
“When I rode by on my bike I was riding real, real fast and when I looked in, his car was backed up against a fire hydrant out there in an awkward position–like he was trying to drive off somewhere.”
Dent said he could not see his cousin in the car so he continued to look for him.
“I kind of figured he was probably running somewhere or trying to get away somewhere. So I was kind of looking for him in the street,” Dent said. “The police grabbed me and turned me around so I had to go all around the neighborhood to go look for him. By the time I made it all the way around my uncle (Leo) had already made it back and was talking to the police officers about what was going on.”
Leo said that after being on the scene for a few minutes with his wife Deana, Jared’s step-mother, he knew it was going to be bad.
“We went back there and they wouldn’t let us in. We kind of felt it was serious because the ambulances weren’t moving and they weren’t talking to us,” Leo said. “They were saying to hold on and they’d come talk to us. We waited and waited and waited and waited and I told my wife it’s not going to be good news.
“I had a real bad feeling so that’s when they came and told us.”
Jared was pronounced dead on the scene. Police would later release information that he was found slumped over in the seat in his still running late-model Monte Carlo with its driver’s side window shattered with bullet holes in his face and neck.
Leo said Jared was by far the youngest of his four children. Jared at 19 had been born to Leo’s second wife 16 years after his nearest sibling. Leo said the culture of the area had changed since the upbringing of his older children.
“When my first set of kids was coming up it was like family. They would listen to what you tell them,” Leo said. “They may go do their little deed or whatever among themselves, but they wouldn’t do it outright like they are doing today and disrespect people and disrespect the community and their parents and older people.
“Now it’s like ‘I don’t give a damn, I’m going to do what I want to do when I want to do it.’ And it’s hard to be a parent like that because they are influenced so much by their peers – the peer pressure – and we fight that constantly.”
Dent said Preston Hollow can be a rough area where violence is not unexpected.
“For Jared it was very unexpected, but for the neighborhood not so much,” Dent said. “A lot of people get into a lot of fights and stuff for various reasons. But to see Jared, it shocked everybody for the whole neighborhood.”
There had already been a shooting in the neighborhood in January of this year.
Leo said he thinks the environment was a large part of the factor leading to Jared’s death.
“They have guys that hang out on the corner and smoke weed and deal drugs and for the life of me I can’t understand why if we know, why the cops don’t know and why they don’t shut it down,” Leo said. “He was friends with them and how much involved he was with what they were doing I don’t know.”
In July of 2010, the summer before his senior year, Jared was arrested for distribution of crack cocaine, but the charges were later dropped. More recently in late 2011 Jared was arrested for possession of marijuana, a charge for which he spent six days in jail and was still on probation for at the time of his death.
“I always asked Jared ‘Are you doing drugs? Are you selling drugs?’ because he was on probation at the time and I said if you get caught with something or you are tested and you test positive for a dirty drug they are going to revoke your probation and you’ll be back in jail,” Leo said. “And he’d say ‘No I‘m OK, I’m good.’
Leo said he warned Jared about who he associated with.
“I think he chose his friends badly and he thought some of the people he was associated with were his friends and nothing would happen to him and he made some mistakes with people he really didn’t know as well as he thought he did,” Leo said. “I told him that all the time. I said ‘Watch who you deal with.’ I know that’s what parents do. They try to look out for their kids. I wanted to protect him. I wanted to keep him from harm and I told his momma that. I told her I was sorry I couldn’t protect him.”
Leo said he cannot blame himself for what happened, but he wishes it would have turned out differently.
“I still feel responsible for him,” Leo said. “You know you always second guess yourself and ask what could I have done? Could I have done more? Maybe communicate with him. Maybe he would have opened up and said some things that he didn’t say. Who knows?
“He was only 19 and he was still my baby. He always thought he was a man. You know when they get 17, 18, 19 years old they think they are a man. And I’d say ‘Yeah, you’re a man, but you are a young man and you’re still my son and you’re still a boy to me. You’re a young man working on being a man, learning how to be a man and you have to slow down and take your time, don’t rush it it’ll come,’ but I couldn’t protect him and I couldn’t be with him 24/7 and I feel badly about that.”
Leo said he now only wants for his son’s murderers to turn around their lives.
“You can arrest ten people and one person or ten people can confess to it and that’s not going to bring my son back. It might give me some satisfaction to find out why you did it, what motivated you to do something like that. What did he to do to deserve you killing him? The only thing that would heal my heart is to have my son back,” Leo said. “I’m not looking for revenge. As a matter of fact, I pray for them. I wish God would bless them and remove them from that kind of activity and deliver them from that kind of activity and that they’d never do that to anyone else because they broke a lot of hearts.”
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